Venetian sound system

Some dialects of Venetian have certain sounds not present in Italian, such as the interdental voiceless fricative, often spelled with ç, z, zh, or ž, and similar to English th in thing and thought. This sound occurs, for example, in çéna 'supper' (also written zhena, žena), which is pronounced the same as Castilian Spanish cena (same meaning). The voiceless interdental fricative occurs in Bellunese, north-Trevisan, and in some Central Venetian rural areas around Padua, Vicenza and the mouth of the river Po. Because the pronunciation variant is more typical of older speakers and speakers living outside of major cities, it has come to be socially stigmatized, and most speakers now use  or  instead of. In those dialects with the pronunciation, the sound has fallen together with ordinary s, and so it is not uncommon to simply write s (or ss between vowels) instead of ç or zh (e.g. sena).

Similarly some dialects of Venetian also have a voiced interdental fricative, often written z (as in el pianze 'he cries'); but in most dialects this sound is now pronounced either as (i.e. Italian voiced-Z), or more typically as  (i.e. Italian voiced-S, written x, as in el pianxe); in a few dialects the sound appears as  and may therefore be written instead with the letter d, as in el piande.

Some varieties of Venetian also distinguish an ordinary vs. a weakened or lenited ("evanescent") l, which in some orthographic norms is indicated with the letter ł; in more conservative dialects, however, both l and ł are merged as ordinary. In those dialects that have both types, the precise phonetic realization of ł depends both on its phonological environment and on the dialect of the speaker. Typical realizations in the region of Venice include a voiced velar approximant or glide (usually described as nearly like an "e" and so often spelled as e), when ł is adjacent (only) to back vowels (a o u), vs. a null realization when ł is adjacent to a front vowel (i e). In dialects further inland ł may be realized as a partially vocalised l. Thus, for example, góndoła 'gondola' may sound like góndoea, góndola or góndoa,. In dialects having a null realization of intervocalic ł, although pairs of words such as scóła 'school' and scóa 'broom' are homophonous (both being pronounced ), they are still distinguished orthographically.

Venetian, like Spanish, does not have the geminate consonants characteristic of standard Italian, Tuscan, Neapolitan and other languages of southern Italy; thus Italian fette, 'slices', palla 'ball' and penna 'pen' correspond to féte, bała, and péna in Venetian. The masculine singular noun ending, corresponding to -o/-e in Italian, is often unpronounced in Venetian, particularly in rural varieties: Italian pieno ('full') corresponds to Venetian pien, Italian altare to Venetian altar. The extent to which final vowels are deleted in pronunciation does however vary by dialect: the central-southern varieties have deletion only after, whereas in the northern variety deletion occurs even after dental stops and velars; the eastern and western varieties exhibit patterns in between these two extremes.

The velar nasal consonant (the final sound in English song) also occurs frequently in Venetian, because word-final /n/ is always velarized and pronounced as. This phenomenon is especially obvious in the pronunciation of many local Venetian surnames that end in n, such as Marin and Manin, as well as in common Venetian words such as man  'hand', piron  'fork'. Speakers of Italian lack this sound and so usually substitute a (geminate) dental for Venetian, changing for example  to  and  to.