Venetian language

Venetian, wider Venetian or Venetan (łéngua vèneta [ˈ(l)eŋɡwa ˈvɛneta] or vèneto [ˈvɛneto]) is a Romance language spoken natively in the northeast of Italy, mostly in the Veneto region, where most of the five million inhabitants can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto: in Trentino, Friuli, the Julian March, Istria, and some towns of Slovenia and Dalmatia (Croatia) by a surviving autochthonous Venetian population, and Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Mexico by Venetians in the diaspora.

Although referred to as an "Italian dialect" (Venetian: diałeto, Italian: dialetto) even by some of its speakers, the label is primarily geographic. Venetian is a separate language from Italian, with many local varieties. Its precise place within the Romance language family remains somewhat controversial. Both Ethnologue and Glottolog group it into the Gallo-Italic branch. Devoto, Avolio and Ursini reject such classification, and Tagliavini places it in the Italo-Dalmatian branch of Romance.