Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken as native language by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where of five million inhabitants almost all can understand it. It is sometime spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia Giulia, Istria and some towns of Dalmatia, an area of six to seven million people. The language is called včneto or včnet in Venetian, veneto in Italian; the variant spoken in Venice is called veneziano. Although referred to as an Italian dialect (dialeto dialetto) even by its speakers, like other Italian dialects it is a sister language of the national language, not a variety or derivative of it. Venetan (and Venetian proper, the language of Venice) display notable structural and lexical differences from Italian. Typologically, Venetan belongs only partly to the Northern Italian group within Romance languages.
Neither Venetan nor Venetian should be confused with Venetic, an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in the Veneto region around the 6th century BC.
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