Medieval and Renaissance Venice: language contact at home and abroad

The case studies in the present essay evoke the range, complexity and overlap of societal phenomena that came into play in the push and pull of language-contact situations involving Venice in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. These include migratory movements, colonial expansion, commercial outreach and production, civilizational prestige, cultural pressure and literary influence. Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors provided the triggers that mediated such contact into the concrete outcomes of language exchange within and outside Venice that are explored and illustrated: from the complex medieval formation of a lagoon koine and the import-export of words in various forms of adaptation to restructuring on the phonological and morphological levels.