Language / Lingua:

It is the undertaking of a project to create a portal of Italian dialects, beginning with the popular traditions of the Veneto, and housing and collecting various forms of expression (poetry, songs, proverbs, etc.) that are meant for everyone and anyone interested in regional Italian culture.

The use of local language, or dialect, is a phenomenon that is of interest for Italy as well as for all other world nations that are slowly and inexorably being absorbed into the “Global Village.”
Today’s societies are characterized by a tendency to homogenize habits, speech, and customs as a way of satisfying individual needs for self-assurance and personal security, with the result that such emphasis on belonging to the larger “group” has meant overlooking certain local traditions.
With the loss of dialect, the history and memory of community also become impoverished; on the other hand, the preservation of dialectal language permits the use of those very resources steeped in tradition, which are both the foundations and undoubtedly the ancestors of culture itself.
Holding on to one’s dialect ultimately does not mean closing oneself off to the reality of the present day, but rather embracing cultural diversity in a world of globalization, where man and woman are able to march ahead, with their feet planted firmly on the ground and their “heads above the clouds.”

 
The site consists of 3 initial sections:“Oral Traditions,” “Popular Culture,” and “Poetry and Song,” in which information will be collected to provide a complete, selected series of documents, both oral and written, on local language, people, history, and customs; which, collectively, will render an exhaustive portrait of the Venetian dialect, while recording the contributions that its speakers have made to modern Italy and to the several countries where they have emigrated.

Owing to the clarity of the site, initially subdivided into three sections that feature various aspects of the Venetian dialects, one is afforded an easy exploration of the content. Note, in fact, to the right, the map of the Veneto region, where the color purple demarcates the territory comprising the cities of Belluno and Vittorio Veneto . Around this latter city and below Belluno extends the area of Northern Treviso (in the Province of Treviso), where the Trevisan-Bellunese dialect is still spoken, which for centuries was found extensively throughout the Veneto Provinces of Treviso and Belluno and also in a part of the Friulian Province around Udine. Certain linguistic phenomenon have been preserved, heard primarily in the most isolated regions, for example, both voiced and voiceless interdentals, as in the ‘δ’ (dh, đ) and ‘zh’ (ž) sounds, the hard-palatal ‘sc-‘ as in ‘sc-iopetada’ and the voiceless ‘s’, differentiated from the ‘ss’ (by being denoted as ‘ş’), which isn’t pronounced in some Venetian dialects.

Digital Dialectics serves to provide a complete portrait of dialect by encouraging similar research among different dialects, in contributing to the preservation of culture and of local language.
The “Dialect Encyclopedia” is therefore a point of reference for increasing knowledge of the dialects, of tradition, and of regional culture. This will continue to be an encyclopedia “in progress” for time to come, like “Resources and Links,” which will continue to expand as the important projects and initiatives of other researchers are added, much toward making the rest of the world aware of the gift of language and the sharing of culture.