User:Horologium/chip

Chipilo Venetian or Chipileño is a diaspora language currently spoken by the descendants of some five hundred 19th century Venetian immigrants to Mexico. The Venetians settled in the State of Puebla, founding the city of Chipilo. A small secondary population exists in the state of Guanajuato, in a village formed by people from Chipilo.

Although the city of Puebla has grown so far as to almost absorb it, the town of Chipilo remained isolated for much of the 20th century. Thus, the Cipiłàn/chipileños, unlike other European immigrants that came to Mexico, did not assimilate into the Mexican culture and retained most of their traditions and their language. To this day, most of the people in Chipilo speak the Venetan or Venetian of their great-grandparents. The variant of the Venetian language spoken by the Cipiłàn/chipileños is the northern Traixàn-Fheltrìn-Bełumàt. However, it has been only slightly altered by Spanish in comparison to the changes to Venetian in the northern Veneto by Italian influence.

There have been several attempts to establish a writing system for the Venetian form spoken in Chipilo. One such system was created by Carolyn McKay, an American linguist who conducted postgraduate research at the Universidad de las Américas. Her proposed system, entirely based on the Italian alphabet, was published in a book entitled Il dialetto veneto di Segusino e Chipilo. This system has been used in some publications made by Cipiłàn/chipileños, but it has not received wide acceptance, because of the differences between Venetian and Italian phonemes. Most of the speakers use the Spanish system they learn at school, even though it does not have letters for specific sounds such as the voiced-S (written [x] in modern Venetian), or the [θ] (written [th] in modern Venetan), and [ð] (written [dh] in modern Venetian). Nevertheless, poet and chipileño Eduardo Montagner Anguiano has suggested standardization of a writing system based on the Spanish alphabet.