The The sociolinguistics of Venetan: Examining dialect vitality, identity, and language use in a bilingual community

This study investigates the vitality of Venetan, an Italo-Romance dialect spoken in the Veneto region of northeastern Italy, within the broader context of dialect shift and language maintenance. Using a questionnaire-based methodology adapted from bilingualism research, we collected data from 477 adult participants and, for a subset of 85, data on their children’s language use. For each participant, a Relative Use Index was calculated to quantify the proportion of Venetan use relative to Italian. Our findings show that older individuals use Venetan more than younger ones, and that women exhibit a greater shift toward Italian than men. A strong sense of local pride and community membership is positively associated with dialect use. Crucially, children’s use of Venetan is almost negligible, and parental (but not grandparental) language input significantly predicts children’s dialect use, suggesting that intergenerational transmission is already severely compromised. These findings contribute to understanding the sociolinguistic processes driving language shift in Veneto and have implications for cognitive research on bidialectalism, where Venetan has recently attracted growing scholarly interest.