thumb|Non-native speaker of the Nuorese dialect of Siniscola.
Sardinian or Sard (  /  ,   or  ) is a Romance language spoken by the Sardinians on the Western Mediterranean island of Sardinia.
Many Romance linguists consider it the language that, together with Italian, is closest to Latin among all its genealogical descendants.
However, it has also incorporated elements of a Pre-Latin (mostly Paleo-Sardinian and, to a much lesser degree, Punic) substratum,Mele, Antonio.
Termini prelatini della lingua sarda tuttora vivi nell'uso.
Edizioni Ilienses, Olzai as well as a Byzantine Greek, Catalan, Spanish and Italian superstratum.
These elements originate in the political history of the Sardinia, whose society experienced for centuries competition and at times conflict with a series of colonizing newcomers: before the Middle Ages, it was for a time a Byzantine possession; then, after a significant period of self-rule with the judicates, it came during the late Middle Ages into the Iberian sphere of influence; and finally, from the early 18th century onward, under the Italian one.
The originality of Sardinian among the Romance idioms had long been known among linguists.
«Il più caratteristico degli idiomi neolatini, di gran lunga più caratteristico del ladino o del franco-provenzale.»
("The most characteristic of the Neo-Latin languages, by far more characteristic than Ladin or Franco-Provençal.")
«Da G. I. Ascoli in poi, tutti i linguisti sono concordi nell'assegnare al sardo un posto particolare fra gl'idiomi neolatini per i varî caratteri che lo distinguono non-solo dai dialetti italiani, ma anche dalle altre lingue della famiglia romanza, e che appaiono tanto nella fonetica, quanto nella morfologia e nel lessico.»
("From G. I. Ascoli onwards, all linguists agree in giving Sardinian a special place among the neo-Latin languages because of the various characteristics that distinguish it not only from the Italian dialects, but also from the other languages of the Romance family, and that appear as much in its phonetics as in its morphology and lexicon.")
Almagia, Roberto; Cortesi, Fabrizio; Salfi, Mario; Sera, Gioacchino; Taramelli, Antonio; Momigliano, Arnaldo; Ciasca, Raffaele; Bottiglioni, Gino; Garzia, Raffa; Gabriel, Gavino; Brunelli, Enrico; Vardabasso, Silvio (1936).
Sardegna in Enciclopedia Italiana, Treccani, "Parlari".
«Il Sardo ha una sua speciale fisionomia ed individualità che lo rende, in certo qual modo, il più caratteristico degli idiomi neolatini; e questa speciale individualità del Sardo, come lingua di tipo arcaico e con una fisionomia inconfondibile, traspare già fin dai più antichi testi.»
In 1997, Sardinian, along with other languages spoken on the island, was recognized by regional law as an official language of Sardinia, and in 1999, Sardinian and eleven other  ("historical linguistic minorities") were similarly recognized as such by national law (specifically, Law No. 482/1999).
Among these, Sardinian is notable as having the largest number of speakers.
«With some 1,6 million speakers, Sardinia is the largest minority language in Italy.
Sardinians form an ethnic minority since they show a strong awareness of being an indigenous group with a language and a culture of their own.
Although Sardinian appears to be recessive in use, it is still spoken and understood by a majority of the population on the island.»
«Nel 1948 la Sardegna diventa, anche per le sue peculiarità linguistiche, Regione Autonoma a statuto speciale.
Tuttavia a livello politico, ufficiale, non cambia molto per la minoranza linguistica sarda, che, con circa 1,2 milioni di parlanti, è la più numerosa tra tutte le comunità alloglotte esistenti sul territorio italiano.»
«Sebbene in continua diminuzione, i sardi costituiscono tuttora la più grossa minoranza linguistica dello stato italiano con ca. 1.000.000 di parlanti stimati (erano 1.269.000 secondo le stime basate sul censimento del 2001)».
Although the Sardinian-speaking community can be said to share a high level of linguistic awareness, language shift has considerably impacted Sardinian, whose speakers have become noticeably reduced in numbers over the years.
Most of them are past retirement age, and less than 15 percent of children were reported to have been passed down some Sardinian as a heritage language.La Nuova Sardegna, 04/11/10, Per salvare i segni dell'identità – di Paolo Coretti As the great majority of Sardinians have long been almost completely assimilated into Italian and only happen to keep a fragmentary knowledge of Sardinian, the use of which being therefore quite limited, To access the data, click on List by languages, Sardinian, then scroll to "Sardinian language use survey".
Sardinian has been classified by UNESCO as "definitely endangered"."
Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger", UNESCO Overview
As an insular language par excellence, Sardinian is considered the most conservative Romance language, as well as one of the most highly individual within the family;«Sardinian is an insular language par excellence: it is at once the most archaic and the most individual among the Romance group.»  its substratum (Paleo-Sardinian or Nuragic) has also been researched.
A 1949 study by the Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree of difference from a language's parent (Latin, in the case of Romance languages) by comparing phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation, indicated the following percentages (the higher the percentage, the greater the distance from Latin): Sardinian 8%, Italian 12%, Spanish 20%, Romanian 23.5%, Occitan 25%, Portuguese 31%, and French 44%.
The significant degree to which the Sardinian language has retained its Latin base was also noted by the French geographer Maurice Le Lannou during a research project on the island in 1941.
«Il fondo della lingua sarda di oggi è il latino.
La Sardegna è il solo paese del mondo in cui la lingua dei Romani si sia conservata come lingua viva.
Questa circostanza ha molto facilitato le mie ricerche nell’isola, perché almeno la metà dei pastori e dei contadini non conoscono l’italiano.»
Although the lexical base is mostly of Latin origin, Sardinian nonetheless retains a number of traces of the linguistic substratum prior to the Roman conquest of the island: several words and especially toponyms stem from Paleo-Sardinian«Prima di tutto, la neonata lingua sarda ingloba un consistente numero di termini e di cadenze provenienti da una lingua originaria preromana, che potremmo chiamare "nuragica".»  and, to a lesser extent, Phoenician-Punic.
These etyma might refer to an early Mediterranean substratum, which reveal close relations with Basque.
In addition to the aforementioned substratum, linguists such as Max Leopold Wagner and Benvenuto Aronne Terracini trace much of the distinctive Latin character of Sardinia to the languoids once spoken by the Christian and Jewish Berbers in North Africa, known as African Romance.
Indeed, Sardinian was perceived as rather similar to African Latin when the latter was still in use, giving credit to the theory that vulgar Latin in both Africa and Sardinia displayed a significant wealth of parallelisms.Paolo Pompilio (1455–91): «» ("where villagers speak an almost intact Latin and, when Latin words are corrupted, then they pass to the sound and habits of the Sardinian language, which, as I myself know, also comes from Latin")».
Quoted in Loporcaro, Michele (2015).
Vowel Length from Latin to Romance, Oxford University Press, p. 48 J. N. Adams is of the opinion that similarities in many words, such as acina (grape), pala (shoulderblade) and spanu(s) ("reddish-brown"), prove that there might have been a fair amount of vocabulary shared between Sardinia and Africa.
According to Wagner, it is notable that Sardinian is the only Romance language whose name for the Milky Way (, "the Way of Straw") also recurs in the Berber languages.
«Wagner prospetta l’ipotesi che la denominazione sarda, identica a quella berbera, sia una reminiscenza atavica di lontane tradizioni comuni e così commenta (p. 277): "Parlando delle sopravvivenze celtiche, dice il Bertoldi: «Come nell’Irlanda odierna, anche nella Gallia antica una maggiore cedevolezza della “materia” linguistica, suoni e forme, rispetto allo “spirito” che resiste più tenace».
Questo vale forse anche per la Sardegna; antichissime usanze, superstizioni, leggende si mantengono più saldamente che non i fugaci fenomeni linguistici".»
To most Italians Sardinian is unintelligible, reminding them of Spanish, because of the way in which the language is acoustically articulated;«Sardinian is unintelligible to most Italians and gives an acoustic impression more similar to Spanish than Italian.
It is clearly and energetically articulated but has always been regarded as barbarous by the soft-speaking Italians.»
characterized as it is by a sharply outlined physiognomy which is displayed from the earliest sources available, it is in fact considered a distinct linguistic group among the Romance languages.
«Sardinian is a highly original conglomerate of dialects with respect to the Neo-Latin varieties and thoroughly distinct from the Italo-Romance typology, and its separateness as a group of its own among the Romance languages is indisputable.»
History
Sardinia's relative isolation from mainland Europe encouraged the development of a Romance language that preserves traces of its indigenous, pre-Roman language(s).
The language is posited to have substratal influences from Paleo-Sardinian, which some scholars have linked to Basque and Etruscan; comparisons have also been drawn with the Berber languages from North AfricaThis is the case, for example, of the pre-Roman prefixes ta, tha, ti, thi, tu which make their appearance in names relating to small animals (e.g.  "lizard",  "grasshopper", etc.) but even to other words beyond that semantic field (e.g.  "bran",  "neck").
to shed more light on the language(s) spoken in Sardinia prior to its Romanization.
Subsequent adstratal influences include Catalan, Spanish, and Italian.
The situation of the Sardinian language with regard to the politically dominant ones did not change until fascism«Dopo pisani e genovesi si erano susseguiti aragonesi di lingua catalana, spagnoli di lingua castigliana, austriaci, piemontesi ed, infine, italiani [...]
Nonostante questi impatti linguistici, la "limba sarda" si mantiene relativamente intatta attraverso i secoli. [...]
Fino al fascismo: che vietò l'uso del sardo non solo in chiesa, ma anche in tutte le manifestazioni folkloristiche.»
and, most evidently, the 1950s.
Origins of modern Sardinian
;Prenuragic and Nuragic era
The origins of ancient Sardinian, also known as Paleo-Sardinian, are currently unknown.
Research has attempted to discover obscure, indigenous, pre-Romance roots.
The root s(a)rd, indicating many place names as well as the island's people, is reportedly either associated with or originating from the Sherden, one of the Sea Peoples.Ugas, Giovanni (2017).
Shardana e Sardegna : i popoli del mare, gli alleati del Nordafrica e la fine dei grandi regni (15.-12. secolo a.C.), Edizioni della Torre, Cagliari, pp.
398–408 Other sources trace instead the root s(a)rd from , a legendary woman from the Anatolian Kingdom of Lydia,Platonis dialogi, scholia in Timaeum (edit. C. F. Hermann, Lipsia 1877), 25 B, p. 368M.
Pittau, La Lingua dei Sardi Nuragici e degli Etruschi, Sassari 1981, p. 57 or from the Libyan mythological figure of the Sardus Pater Babai ("Sardinian Father" or "Father of the Sardinians").Sallust, Historiae, II, fr.4Pausanias, Ελλάδοσ περιήγησισ, X, 17Silius Italicus, Punica, XII, 360Gaius Julius Solinus, Collectanea rerum memorabilium, IV, 1Isidore of Seville, XIV, Etymologiae, Thapsumque iacentem, 39Serra, Marcello (1978).
Enciclopedia della Sardegna : con un saggio introduttivo intitolato Alla scoperta dell'isola, Pisa, Giardini editori e stampatori, p. 29: "Origine e carattere dei Sardi"
In 1984, Massimo Pittau claimed to have found the etymology of many Latin words in the Etruscan language, after comparing it with the Nuragic language(s).
Etruscan elements, formerly thought to have originated in Latin, would indicate a connection between the ancient Sardinian culture and the Etruscans.
According to Pittau, the Etruscan and Nuragic language(s) are descended from Lydian (and therefore Indo-European) as a consequence of contact with Etruscans and other Tyrrhenians from Sardis as described by Herodotus.
Although Pittau suggests that the Tirrenii landed in Sardinia and the Etruscans landed in modern Tuscany, his views are not shared by most Etruscologists.
According to Bertoldi and Terracini, Paleo-Sardinian has similarities with the Iberic languages and Siculian; for example, the suffix -ara in proparoxytones indicated the plural.
Terracini proposed the same for suffixes in -, -/ànna/, -/énna/, -/ònna/ +  + a paragogic vowel (such as the toponym Bunnànnaru).
Rohlfs, Butler and Craddock add the suffix - (such as the toponym Barùmini) as a unique element of Paleo-Sardinian.
Suffixes in /a, e, o, u/ + -rr- found a correspondence in north Africa (Terracini), in Iberia (Blasco Ferrer) and in southern Italy and Gascony (Rohlfs), with a closer relationship to Basque (Wagner and Hubschmid).
However, these early links to a Basque precursor have been questioned by some Basque linguists.Trask, L.
The History of Basque Routledge: 1997  According to Terracini, suffixes in -, -, -, and - are common to Paleo-Sardinian and northern African languages.
Pittau emphasized that this concerns terms originally ending in an accented vowel, with an attached paragogic vowel; the suffix resisted Latinization in some place names, which show a Latin body and a Nuragic suffix.
According to Bertoldi, some toponyms ending in - and -/asài/ indicated an Anatolian influence.
The suffix -/aiko/, widely used in Iberia and possibly of Celtic origin, and the ethnic suffix in -/itanos/ and -/etanos/ (for example, the Sardinian Sulcitanos) have also been noted as Paleo-Sardinian elements (Terracini, Ribezzo, Wagner, Hubschmid and Faust).
Some linguists, like Max Leopold Wagner (1931), Blasco Ferrer (2009, 2010) and Arregi (2017) have attempted to revive a theoretical connection with Basque by linking words such as Sardinian idile "marshland" and Basque itil "puddle"; Sardinian ospile "fresh grazing for cattle" and Basque hozpil "cool, fresh"; Sardinian arrotzeri "vagabond" and Basque arrotz "stranger"; Sardinian golostiu and Basque gorosti "holly"; Gallurese (Corso-Sardinian) zerru "pig" (with z for [dz]) and Basque zerri (with z for [s]).
Genetic data have found the Basques to be close to the Sardinians.Arnaiz-Villena A, Rodriguez de Córdoba S, Vela F, Pascual JC, Cerveró J, Bootello A. – HLA antigens in a sample of the Spanish population: common features among Spaniards, Basques, and Sardinians.
– Hum Genet.
1981;58(3):344-8.
thumb|right|upright|Location of the Sardinian tribes, as described by the Roman sources.
thumb|right|upright|250px|Length of the Roman rule and emergence of the Romance languages.
Since the Neolithic period, some degree of variance across the island's regions is also attested.
The Arzachena culture, for instance, suggests a link between the northernmost Sardinian region (Gallura) and southern Corsica that finds further confirmation in the Natural History by Pliny the Elder.
There are also some stylistic differences across Northern and Southern Nuragic Sardinia, which may indicate the existence of two other tribal groups (Balares and Ilienses) mentioned by the same Roman author.
According to the archeologist Giovanni Ugas,Giovanni Ugas – L'alba dei Nuraghi (2005) p. 241 these tribes may have in fact played a role in shaping the current regional linguistic differences of the island.
;Classical period
Around the 10th and 9th century BC, Phoenician merchants were known to have made their presence in Sardinia, which acted as a geographical mediator in between the Iberian and the Italian peninsula.
In the eighth and seventh centuries, the Phoenicians began to develop permanent settlements, politically arranged as city-states in similar fashion to the Lebanese coastal areas.
It did not take long before they started gravitating around the Carthaginian sphere of influence, whose level of prosperity spurred Carthage to send a series of expeditionary forces to the island; although they were initially repelled by the natives, the North African city vigorously pursued a policy of active imperialism and, by the sixth century, managed to establish its political hegemony and military control over South-Western Sardinia.
Punic began to be spoken in the area, and many words entered ancient Sardinian as well.
Names like giara "plateau" (cf. Hebrew "forest, scrub"), g(r)uspinu "nasturtium" (from the Punic cusmin), curma "fringed rue" (cf. ḥarmal "Syrian rue"), mítza "source" (cf. Hebrew mitsa, metza "place whence something emerges"), síntziri "marsh horsetail" (from the Punic zunzur "common knotgrass"), tzeúrra "sprout" (from the Punic zeraʿ "seed"), tzichirìa "dill" (from the Punic sikkíria; cf. Hebrew šēkār "ale") and tzípiri "rosemary" (from the Punic zibbir) are commonly used, especially in the modern Sardinian varieties of the Campidanese plain, while proceeding northwards the influence is more limited to place names, such as the town of Magomadas, Macumadas in Nuoro or Magumadas in Gesico and
Nureci, all of which deriving from the Punic maqom hadash "new city".Giulio Paulis, «Sopravvivenze della lingua punica in Sardegna», in L'Africa romana, Atti del VII Convegno di Studio (Sassari 1989), Sassari, Gallizzi, 1990, pp.
599–639Giulio Paulis, «L'influsso linguistico fenicio-punico in Sardegna.
Nuove acquisizioni e prospettive di ricerca», in Circolazioni culturali nel Mediterraneo antico.
Atti della VI giornata camito-semtica e indoeuropea, I Convegno Internazionale di linguistica dell'area mediterranea, Sassari 24–27 aprile 1991, edited by Paolo Filigheddu, Cagliari, Corda, 1994, pp.
213–219
The Roman domination began in 238 BC, but was often contested by the local Sardinian tribes, who had by then acquired a high level of political organization,Giovanni Lilliu, Sopravvivenze nuragiche in età romana cit., in «L'Africa romana», VII, Gallizzi , Sassari 1990, p. 443 and would manage to only partly supplant the pre-Latin Sardinian languages, including Punic.
Although the colonists and negotiatores (businessmen) of strictly Italic descent would later play a relevant role in introducing and spreading Latin to Sardinia, Romanisation proved slow to take hold among the Sardinian natives,«Sardinia was under the control of Carthage from around 500BC.
It was conquered by Rome in 238/7 BC, but was isolated and apparently despised by the Romans, and Romanization was not rapid.»
whose proximity to the Carthaginian cultural influence was noted by Roman authors.
«E viceversa gli scrittori romani giudicavano la Sardegna una terra malsana, dove dominava la pestilentia (la malaria), abitata da popoli di origine africana ribelli e resistenti, impegnati in latrocinia ed in azioni di pirateria che si spingevano fino al litorale etrusco; un luogo terribile, scarsamente urbanizzato, destinato a diventare nei secoli la terra d’esilio per i condannati ad metalla».
Punic continued to be spoken well into the 3rd-4th century AD, as attested by votive inscriptions,Ignazio Putzu, "La posizione linguistica del sardo nel contesto mediterraneo", in Neues aus der Bremer Linguistikwerkstatt: aktuelle Themen und Projekte, ed. Cornelia Stroh (Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 2012), 183.
and it is thought that the natives from the most interior areas, led by the tribal chief Hospito, joined their brethren in making the switch to Latin around the 7th century AD, through their conversion to Christianity."
The last to use that idiom, the inhabitants of Barbagia, renounced it in the seventh century together with paganism in favor of Latin, still an archaic substratum in the Sardinian language."
Proceedings, VII Congress, Boulder-Denver, Colorado, August 14-September 19, 1965, International Association for Quaternary Research, Indiana University Press, p. 28Pope Symmachus (498–514 C.E.), a Sardinian by birth, described himself as ex paganitate veniens, "coming from a pagan land".
Gregory the Great (590–614 C.E.) reproached the people of Barbagia for still worshipping stone and wooden idols (Wagner 1951: 73).
Cicero, who loathed the Sardinians on the ground of numerous factors, such as their outlandish language, their kinship with Carthage and their refusal to engage with Rome,«Cicerone in particolare odiava i Sardi per il loro colorito terreo, per la loro lingua incomprensibile, per l’antiestetica mastruca, per le loro origini africane e per l’estesa condizione servile, per l’assenza di città alleate dei Romani, per il rapporto privilegiato dei Sardi con l’antica Cartagine e per la resistenza contro il dominio di Roma.»
would call the Sardinian rebels latrones mastrucati ("thieves with rough wool cloaks") or Afri ("Africans") to emphasize Roman superiority over a population mocked as the refuse of Carthage.
«»  ("All the monuments of the ancients and all histories have handed down to us the tradition that the nation of the Phoenicians is the most treacherous of all nations.
The Poeni, who are descended from them, have proved by many rebellions of the Carthaginians, and very many broken and violated treaties, that they have in no respect degenerated from them.
The Sardinians, who are sprung from the Poeni, with an admixture of African blood, were not led into Sardinia as colonists and established there, but are rather a tribe who were draughted off, and put there to get rid of them.
Nor indeed, when I speak of the vices of the nation, do I except no one.
But I am forced to speak generally of the entire race; in which, perhaps, some individuals by their own civilized habits and natural humanity have got the better of the vices of their family and nation.
That the greater part of the nation is destitute of faith, destitute of any community and connection with our name, the facts themselves plainly show.
For what province is there besides Sardinia which has not one city in it on friendly terms with the Roman people, not one free city?
Africa itself is the parent of Sardinia, which has waged many most bitter wars against our ancestors."
Translation by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London.
Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden.
1856, ) A number of obscure Nuragic roots remained unchanged, and in many cases Latin accepted the local roots (like nur, presumably from Norax, which makes its appearance in nuraghe, Nurra, Nurri and many other toponyms).
Barbagia, the mountainous central region of the island, derives its name from the Latin Barbaria (a term meaning "Land of the Barbarians", similar in origin to the now antiquated word "Barbary"), because its people refused cultural and linguistic assimilation for a long time: 50% of toponyms of central Sardinia, particularly in the territory of Olzai, are actually not related to any known language.Wolf H. J., 1998, Toponomastica barbaricina, p. 20 Papiros publisher, Nuoro According to Terracini, amongst the regions in Europe that went on to draw their language from Latin, Sardinia has overall preserved the highest proportion of pre-Latin toponyms.
Besides the place names, on the island there are still a few names of plants, animals and geological formations directly traceable to the ancient Nuragic era.Cf.
By the end of the Roman domination, Latin had gradually become however the speech of most of the island's inhabitants.Casula, Francesco Cesare (1994).
La Storia di Sardegna.
Sassari, it: Carlo Delfino Editore. .
p. 110 As a result of this protracted and prolonged process of Romanisation, the modern Sardinian language is today classified as Romance or neo-Latin, with some phonetic features resembling Old Latin.
Some linguists assert that modern Sardinian, being part of the Island Romance group, was the first language to split off from Latin, all others evolving from Latin as Continental Romance.
In fact, contact with Rome might have ceased from as early as the first century BC.
«Although it is an established historical fact that Roman dominion over Sardinia lasted until the fifth century, it has been argued, on purely linguistic grounds, that linguistic contact with Rome ceased much earlier than this, possibly as early as the first century BC.»
In terms of vocabulary, Sardinian retains an array of peculiar Latin-based forms that are either unfamiliar to, or have altogether disappeared in, the rest of the Romance-speaking world.For a list of widely used words in Sardinian that were already considered quite archaic by the time of Marcus Terentius Varro, see
The number of Latin inscriptions on the island is relatively small and fragmented.
Some engraved poems in ancient Greek and Latin (the two most prestigious languages in the Roman EmpireCum utroque sermone nostro sis paratus.
Svetonio, De vita Caesarum, Divus Claudius, 42) are seen in the so-called "Viper's Cave" (Gruta 'e sa Pibera in Sardinian, Grotta della Vipera in Italian, Cripta Serpentum in Latin), a burial monument built in Caralis (Cagliari) by Lucius Cassius Philippus (a Roman who had been exiled to Sardinia) in remembrance of his dead spouse Atilia Pomptilla;«Le ultime provengono, per lo più, come quelle metriche della "Grotta della Vipera" nel sobborgo cagliaritano di Sant’Avendrace, da tombe di continentali immigrati.
Oltre a ciò il numero delle iscrizioni latine in Sardegna non è molto elevato e il loro contenuto è spesso frammentario; e, per di più, quasi due terzi di esse provengono da Cagliari e dal suo distretto.»
we also have some religious works by Eusebius and Saint Lucifer, both from Caralis and in the writing style of whom may be noted the lexicon and perifrastic forms typical of Sardinian (e.g.  in place of ; compare with Sardinian  or  "to say").
After a period of 80 years under the Vandals, Sardinia would again be part of the Byzantine Empire under the Exarchate of Africa«Dopo la dominazione vandalica, durata ottanta anni, la Sardegna ritornava di nuovo all’impero, questa volta a quello d’Oriente.
Anche sotto i Bizantini la Sardegna rimase alle dipendenze dell’esarcato africano, ma l’amministrazione civile fu separata da quella militare; alla prima fu preposto un , alla seconda un ; tutti e due erano alle dipendenze del  e del  africani.»
for almost another five centuries.
In spite of this, Greek proved unable to enter the Sardinian language, except for some ritual or formal expressions using Greek structure and, sometimes, the Greek alphabet.M. Wescher e M. Blancard, Charte sarde de l'abbaye de Saint-Victor de Marseille écrite en caractères grecs, in "Bibliothèque de l' École des chartes", 35 (1874), pp.
255–265 Evidence for this is found in the condaghes, the first written documents in Sardinian.
From the long Byzantine era there are only a few entries but they already provide a glimpse of the sociolinguistical situation on the island in which, in addition to the community's everyday Neo-Latin language, Greek was also spoken by the ruling classes.Giulio Paulis, Lingua e cultura nella Sardegna Bizantina, Sassari, 1983 Some toponyms, such as Jerzu (thought to derive from the Greek khérsos, "untilled"), together with the personal names Mikhaleis, Konstantine and Basilis, demonstrate Greek influence.
As the Muslims made their way into North Africa, what remained of the Byzantine possession of the Exarchate was only the Balearic Islands and Sardinia.
Since the Byzantines were all intent on reconquering southern Italy and Sicily, which had fallen to the Muslims, their attention on Sardinia was neglected and communications broke down with Constantinople; this spurred the former Byzantine province of Sardinia to become progressively more autonomous from the Byzantine oecumene (Greek: οἰκουμένη), and eventually attain independence.
{{anchor|[[Sardinian medieval kingdoms]]}}Judicates period
Sardinian was the first Romance language of all to gain official status, being used by the four Judicates,"La lingua sarda acquisì dignità di lingua nazionale già dall'ultimo scorcio del secolo XI quando, grazie a favorevoli circostanze storico-politiche e sociali, sfuggì alla limitazione dell'uso orale per giungere alla forma scritta, trasformandosi in volgare sardo."
Cecilia Tasca (a cura di), 2003.
Manoscritti e lingua sarda, La memoria storica, p. 15«Moreover, the Sardinians are the first Romance-speaking people of all who made the language of the common folk the official language of the State, the Government...»
Puddu, Mario (2002).
Istoria de sa limba sarda, Ed. Domus de Janas, Selargius, p. 14Gian Giacomo Ortu, La Sardegna dei Giudici p. 264, Il Maestrale 2005Maurizio Virdis, Le prime manifestazioni della scrittura nel cagliaritano, in Judicalia, Atti del Seminario di Studi Cagliari 14 dicembre 2003, a cura di B. Fois, Cagliari, Cuec, 2004, pp.
45–54.As Ludovico Antonio Muratori noted, «» ("In reality, I believe that our people [Italians] have been induced to employ the Italian language for writing by following the example of our neighbours, the Provençals, the Corsicans and the Sardinians") and «» ("Moreover, I made reference to the example of the Sardinians and the Corsicans, who used their own vulgar language, as being those who preceded the Italians in such regard").
Antonio, Ludovico Antonio (1739).
Antiquitates Italicae Moedii Evi, Mediolani, t.
2, col.1049 former Byzantine districts that became independent political entities after the Arab expansion in the Mediterranean had cut off any ties left between the island and Byzantium.
The exceptionality of the Sardinian situation, which in this sense constitutes a unique case throughout the Latin-speaking Europe, consists in the fact that any official text was written solely in Sardinian from the very beginning and completely excluded Latin, unlike what was happening – and would continue to happen – in France, Italy and Iberia at the same time; Latin, although co-official, was in fact only used in documents concerning relations with the European continent.
«Un caso unico – e a parte – nel dominio romanzo è costituito dalla Sardegna, in cui i documenti giuridici incominciano ad essere redatti interamente in volgare già alla fine dell'XI secolo e si fanno più frequenti nei secoli successivi. (...)
L'eccezionalità della situazione sarda nel panorama romanzo consiste – come si diceva – nel fatto che tali testi sono stati scritti sin dall'inizio interamente in volgare.
Diversamente da quanto succede a questa altezza cronologica (e anche dopo) in Francia, in Provenza, in Italia e nella Penisola iberica, il documento sardo esclude del tutto la compresenza di volgare e latino. (...)
il sardo era usato prevalentemente in documenti a circolazione interna, il latino in documenti che concernevano il rapporto con il continente.»
Awareness of the dignity of Sardinian for official purposes was such that, in the words of Livio Petrucci, a Neo-Latin language had come to be used "at a time when nothing similar can be observed in the Italian peninsula" not only "in the legal field" but also "in any other field of writing".
Old Sardinian had a greater number of archaisms and Latinisms than the present language does, with few Germanic words, mostly coming from Latin itself, and even fewer Arabisms, which had been imported by scribes from Iberia; in spite of their best efforts with a score of expeditions to the island, from which they would get considerable booty and a hefty number of Sardinian slaves, the Arab assailants were in fact each time forcefully driven back and would never manage to conquer and settle on the island.
Although the surviving texts come from such disparate areas as the north and the south of the island, Sardinian then presented itself in a rather homogeneous form: even though the orthographic differences between Logudorese and Campidanese were beginning to appear, Wagner found in this period "the original unity of the Sardinian language".
«Ma, prescindendo dalle divergenze stilistiche e da altri particolari minori, si può dire che la lingua dei documenti antichi è assai omogenea e che, ad ogni modo, l’originaria unità della lingua sarda vi si intravede facilmente.»
In agreement with Wagner is Paolo Merci, who found a "broad uniformity" around this period, as were Antonio Sanna and Ignazio Delogu too, for whom it was the islanders' community life that prevented Sardinian from localism.
According to Carlo Tagliavini, these earlier documents show the existence of a Sardinian Koine which pointed to a model based on Logudorese.
According to Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, it was in the wake of the fall of the Judicates of Cagliari and Gallura, in the second half of the 13th century, that Sardinian began to fragment into its modern dialects, undergoing some Tuscanization under the rule of the Republic of Pisa; it did not take long before the Genoese too started carving their own sphere of influence in northern Sardinia, both through the mixed Sardinian-Genoese nobility of Sassari and the members of the Doria family.
A certain range of dialectal variation is then noted.
A special position was occupied by the Judicate of Arborea, the last Sardinian kingdom to fall to foreign powers, in which a transitional dialect was spoken, that of Middle Sardinian.
The Carta de Logu of the Kingdom of Arborea, one of the first constitutions in history drawn up in 1355–1376 by Marianus IV and the Queen, the "Lady Judge" ( in Sardinian,  in Catalan,  in Italian) Eleanor, was written in this transitional variety of Sardinian, and would remain in force until 1827.
The Arborean judges' effort to unify the Sardinian dialects were due to their desire to be legitimate rulers of the entire island under a single state ( "Sardinian Republic");Barisone II of Arborea, G. Seche,  L'incoronazione di Barisone "Re di Sardegna" in due fonti contemporanee: gli Annales genovesi e gli Annales pisani, Rivista dell'Istituto di storia dell'Europa mediterranea, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, n°4, 2010 such political goal, after all, was already manifest in 1164, when the Arborean Judge Barison ordered his great seal to be made with the writings  ("Barison, by the grace of God, King of Sardinia") and  ("The people's rule is equal to the Sardinians' own force").Casula, Francesco Cesare (2017).
La scrittura in Sardegna dal nuragico ad oggi, Carlo Delfino Editore, p. 91
Dante Alighieri wrote in his 1302–05 essay De vulgari eloquentia that Sardinians were strictly speaking not Italians (), even though they appeared superficially similar to them, and they did not speak anything close to a Neo-Latin language of their own (), but resorted to aping straightforward Latin instead.
«».
Dantis Alagherii De Vulgari Eloquentia, (Lib. I, XI, 7), The Latin Library«As for the Sardinians, who are not Italian but may be associated with Italians for our purposes, out they must go, because they alone seem to lack a vernacular of their own, instead imitating gramatica as apes do humans: for they say domus nova [my house] and dominus meus [my master].»
«Dante, for instance, said that Sardinians were like monkeys imitating men.»
«Eliminiamo anche i Sardi (che non sono Italiani, ma sembrano accomunabili agli Italiani) perché essi soli appaiono privi di un volgare loro proprio e imitano la "gramatica" come le scimmie imitano gli uomini: dicono infatti "domus nova" e "dominus meus"».
De Vulgari Eloquentia.
Paraphrase and notes by Sergio Cecchin.
Opere minori di Dante Alighieri, vol. II, UTET, Torino 1986Salvi, Sergio.
Le lingue tagliate: storia delle minoranze linguistiche in Italia, Rizzoli, 1975, p. 195«In..
perceiving that the ‘outlandish’ character of Sardinian speech lay in its approximation to Latin the poet-philologist [Dante] had almost divined the truth concerning the origin of the Romance languages.»
W. D. Elcock, The Romance Languages (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), v. 474 Dante's view on the Sardinians, however, is proof of how their language had been following its own course in a way which was already unintelligible to non-islanders, and had become, in Wagner's words, an impenetrable "sphinx" to their judgment.
Frequently mentioned is a previous 12th-century poem by the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Domna, tant vos ai preiada ("Lady, so much I have endeared you"); Sardinian epitomizes outlandish speech therein, along with non-Romance languages such as German and Berber, with the troubadour having the lady say «» ("I don't understand you more than a German or Sardinian or Berber"); the Tuscan poet Fazio degli Uberti refers to the Sardinians in his poem  as «» ("a people that no one is able to understand / nor do they come to a knowledge of what other peoples say about them").Dittamondo III XII 56 ss.
The Muslim geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who lived in Palermo, Sicily at the court of King Roger II, wrote in his work  ("The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands" or, simply, "The book of Roger") that «Sardinians are ethnically , like the Berbers; they shun contacts with all the other  nations and are people of purpose and valiant that never leave the arms».
«». .
Annali della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere dell'Università di Sassari, Vol. 3 (2003 pubbl. 2005), pp.
287-297.
ISSN 1828-5384Mastino, Attilio (2005).
Storia della Sardegna antica, Edizioni Il Maestrale, p. 83Translation provided by Michele Amari: «I sardi sono di schiatta Rum Afariqah (latina d'Africa), berberizzanti.
Rifuggono (dal consorzio) di ogni altra nazione di Rum: sono gente di proposito e valorosa, che non lascia mai l'arme.»
Note to the passage by Mohamed Mustafa Bazama: «Questo passo, nel testo arabo, è un poco differente, traduco qui testualmente: "gli abitanti della Sardegna, in origine sono dei Rum Afariqah, berberizzanti, indomabili.
Sono una (razza a sé) delle razze dei Rum. [...]
Sono pronti al richiamo d'aiuto, combattenti, decisivi e mai si separano dalle loro armi (intende guerrieri nati).»
Another translation into Italian from the original passage in Arabic: «I sardi, popolo di razza latina africana piuttosto barbaro, che vive appartato dal consorzio delle altre genti latine, sono intrepidi e risoluti; essi non abbandonano mai le armi.»
Mastino, Attilio (2005).
Storia della Sardegna antica, Edizioni Il Maestrale, p.83 According to Wagner, the close relationship in the development of Vulgar Latin between North Africa and Sardinia might not have only derived from ancient ethnic affinities between the two populations, but also from their common political past within the Exarchate of Africa.
«Non vi è dubbio che vi erano rapporti più stretti tra la latinità dell'Africa settentrionale e quella della Sardegna.
Senza parlare della affinità della razza e degli elementi libici che possano ancora esistere in sardo, non bisogna dimenticare che la Sardegna rimase, durante vari secoli, alle dipendenze dell'esarcato africano».
Wagner, M. (1952).
Il Nome Sardo del Mese di Giugno (Lámpadas) e i Rapporti del Latino d'Africa con quello della Sardegna.
Italica, 29(3), p.152.
doi:10.2307/477388
What literature is left to us from this period primarily consists of legal and administrative documents, besides the aforementioned Cartas and condaghes.
The first document containing Sardinian elements is a 1063 donation to the abbey of Montecassino signed by Barisone I of Torres.Archivio Cassinense Perg.
Caps.
XI, n. 11 " e "TOLA P., Codice Diplomatico della Sardegna, I, Sassari, 1984, p. 153 Another such document (the so-called Carta Volgare) comes from the Judicate of Cagliari and was issued by Torchitorio I de Lacon-Gunale in around 1070, written in Sardinian whilst still employing the Greek alphabet.Ferrer, Eduardo Blasco (1984).
Storia Linguistica Della Sardegna, p. 65, De Gruyter Other documents are the Carta Volgare (1070–1080) in Campidanese, the 1080 Logudorese Privilege, the 1089 Donation of Torchitorio (in the Marseille archives),«» the 1190–1206 Marsellaise Chart (in Campidanese)«» and an 1173 communication between the Bishop Bernardo of Civita and Benedetto, who oversaw the Opera del Duomo in Pisa.
«» The Statutes of Sassari (1316) and Castelgenovese (c. 1334) are written in Logudorese.
«»
The first chronicle in lingua sive ydiomate sardo,Antonietta Orunesu, Valentino Pusceddu (a cura di).
Cronaca medioevale sarda: i sovrani di Torres, 1993, Astra, Quartu S.Elena, p. 11 called , was published anonymously in the 13th century, relating the events of the Judicate of Torres.
Iberian period – Catalan and Castilian influence
The 1297 feoffment of Sardinia by Pope Boniface VIII led to the creation of the Aragonese Kingdom of Sardinia and a long period of war between the Aragonese and Sardinians, ending with an Aragonese victory at Sanluri in 1409 and the renunciation of any succession right signed by William II of Narbonne in 1420.Francesco Cesare Casula, La storia di Sardegna, 1994 During this period the clergy adopted Catalan as their primary language, relegating Sardinian to a secondary but nonetheless relevant status with regards to the official acts and the Realm's law (the  was extended to most of the island in 1421 by the Parliament).
Agreeing with Fara's ,«[Sardinians] speak a peculiar language, Sardinian, and use it to write both in poetry and prose, especially in Logudoro where it has been kept purer, and more elegant and rich.
And, since many Spaniards, both Aragonese and Catalan, and Italians immigrated to Sardinia, and keep doing so to trade, Spanish, Catalan and Italian are also spoken; so, a single people is able to hold a conversation in all these languages.
However, those from Cagliari and Alghero usually speak their masters' language, Catalan, whilst the other people retain the genuine language of the Sardinians.»
Original text: «[Sardi] Loquuntur lingua propria sardoa, tum ritmice, tum soluta oratione, praesertim in Capite Logudorii, ubi purior copiosior, et splendidior est.
Et quia Hispani plures Aragonenses et Cathalani et Itali migrarunt in eam, et commerciorum caussa quotidie adventant, loquuntur etiam lingua hispanica et cathalana et italica; hisque omnibus linguis concionatur in uno eodemque populo.
Caralitani tamen et Algharenses utuntur suorum maiorum lingua cathalana; alii vero genuinam retinent Sardorum linguam.»
Fara, Francesco Giovanni (1580).
De Rebus Sardois, De natura et moribus Sardorum, 1835-1580, Turin, p. 51 the Sardinian attorney Sigismondo Arquer, author of  in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia universalis (whose report would also be quoted in Conrad Gessner's "On the different languages used by the various nations across the globe" with minor variationsGessner, Conrad (1555).
De differentiis linguarum tum veterum tum quae hodie apud diversas nationes in toto orbe terraru in usu sunt, Sardorum lingua: pp.
66–67), stated that Sardinian prevailed in most of the Kingdom, with particular regard for the rural interior, and Catalan and Spanish were spoken in the cities, where the ruling class eventually became plurilingual in both the native and the Iberian languages;Sigismondo Arquer (edited by Maria Teresa Laneri, 2008).
Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio, CUEC, p. 30, De Sardorum Lingua.
«Certainly, the Sardinians had once their own language, however since many peoples immigrated to the island and it fell under the rule of many foreign powers (namely Latins, Pisans, Genoese, Spanish and Africans), the language of the Sardinians became extremely corrupted; nonetheless, a number of words which have no equivalent in any other language have been preserved. [...]
Because of this, the Sardinians speak in a very different way depending on where they live, since they have been under many diverse dominations; however, they manage to understand each other perfectly.
On the island are two main languages, the first in the cities and the latter out of their reach.
People from the cities commonly speak Spanish, Tarragonese or Catalan, which they learnt from the Spaniards, who also occupy much of the official positions; the others, on the other hand, retain the genuine language of the Sardinians.»
Original text: «Habuerunt quidem Sardi linguam propriam, sed quum diversi populi immigraverint in eam atque ab exteris principibus eius imperium usurpatum fuerit, nempe Latinis, Pisanis, Genuensibus, Hispanis et Afris, corrupta fuit multum lingua eorum, relictis tamen plurimis vocabulis, quae in nullo inveniuntur idiomate. [...]
Hinc est quod Sardi in diversis locis tam diverse loquuntur, iuxta quod tam varium habuerunt imperium, etiamsi ipsi mutuo sese recte intelligant.
Sunt autem duae praecipuae in ea insula linguae, una qua utuntur in civitatibus, et altera qua extra civitates.
Oppidani loquuntur fere lingua Hispanica, Tarraconensi seu Catalana, quam didicerunt ab Hispanis, qui plerumque magistratum in eisdem gerunt civitatibus: alii vero genuinam retinent Sardorum Linguam.»
Sigismondo, Arquer (1549).
Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio, De Sardorum Lingua Alghero is still a Catalan-speaking enclave on Sardinia to this day.Why is Catalan spoken in L'Alguer?
– Corpus Oral de l'Alguerès This sociolinguistic situation was reported by various authors, including the ambassador Martin Carillo (supposed author of the ironic judgment on the Sardinians' tribal and sectarian divisions: «» "few, thickheaded, and badly united"), the anonymous , a passage of which reads: «» ("they speak Catalan very well, as though I was in Catalonia"); Anselm Adorno, a wealthy Genoese residing in Bruges who noted that, many foreigners notwithstanding, the native population spoke their own language (); and, finally, the rector of the Jesuit college of Sassari, Baldassarre Pinyes, who wrote in Rome: «» ("as far as the Sardinian language is concerned, Your Paternity, know that it is not spoken in this city, nor in Alghero, nor in Cagliari: they only speak it in the towns").
The long-lasting war and the so-called Black Death had a devastating effect on the island, depopulating large parts of it.
People from the neighbouring island of Corsica, which had been already Tuscanised, began to settle en masse in the northern Sardinian coast, leading to the birth of Sassarese and then Gallurese, two Italo-Dalmatian lects.Carlo Maxia, Studi Sardo-Corsi, Dialettologia e storia della lingua fra le due isoleCiurrata di la linga gadduresa, Atti del II Convegno Internazionale di Studi
Despite Catalan being widely spoken and written on the island at this time (leaving a lasting influence in Sardinian), there are some written records of Sardinian, which was estimated to be the ordinary language of the Sardinians by the Jesuits in 1561.Turtas, Raimondo (1981).
La questione linguistica nei collegi gesuitici in Sardegna nella seconda metà del Cinquecento, in "Quaderni sardi di storia" 2, p. 57-87, at p. 60 One is the 15th-century , written by Antòni Canu (1400–1476) and published in 1557.
The 16th century is instead marked by a new Sardinian literary revival: , by Hieronimu Araolla, was aimed at "glorifying and enriching Sardinian, our language" () as the Spanish, French and Italian poets had already done for their own languages ( and ).
This way, Araolla is one of the first Sardinian authors to bind the language to a Sardinian nation,«First attempts at national self-assertion through language date back to the 16th century, when G. Araolla, a speaker of Sassarese, wrote a poem intended to enrich and honour the Sardinian language.»
the existence of which is not outright stated but naturally implied.
«Intendendo esservi una "naturalità" della lingua propria delle diverse "nazioni", così come v'è la lingua naturale della "nazione sarda", espressione, quest'ultima, non usata ma ben sottintesa.»
Incipit to "Lettera al Maestro" in  :  Antonio Lo Frasso, a poet born in AlgheroJ.
Arce, La literatura hispánica de Cerdeña.
Revista de la Facultad de Filología, 1956 (a city he remembered fondly)«... L'Alguer castillo fuerte bien murado / con frutales por tierra muy divinos / y por la mar coral fino eltremado / es ciudad de mas de mil vezinos...»  who spent his life in Barcelona, wrote lyric poetry in Sardinian.An example of it are the octaves found in Lo Frasso, Antonio (1573).
Los diez libros de fortuna d'Amor «»
Through the marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469 and, later in 1624, the reorganization of the monarchy led by the Count-Duke of Olivares, Sardinia would progressively join a broad Spanish cultural sphere and leave the exclusive Aragonese one.
Spanish was perceived as an elitist language, gaining solid ground among the ruling Sardinian class; Spanish had thus a profound influence on Sardinian, especially in those words, styles and cultural models owing to the prestigious international role of the Habsburg Monarchy as well as the Court.Jacinto Arnal de Bolea (1636), El Forastero, Antonio Galcerin editor, Cagliari – "....ofreciéndonos a la vista la insigne ciudad de Càller, corte que me dixeron era de aquel reino. ....La hermosura de las damas, el buen gusto de su alino, lo prendido y bien saconado de lo curioso-dandole vida con mil donaires-, la grandeza en los titulos, el lucimientos en los cavalleros, el concurso grande de la nobleza y el agasajo para un forastero no os los podrà zifrar mi conocimiento.
Basta para su alavanza el deciros que alcuna vez, con olvido en mi peregrinaciò y con descuido en mis disdichas, discurria por los templos no estrano y por las calles no atajado, me hallava con evidencias grandes que era aquel sitio el alma de Madrid, que con tanta urbanidad y cortesìa se exercitavan en sus nobles correspondencias" Most Sardinian authors would write in both Spanish and Sardinian until the 19th century and were well-versed in the former, like Vicente Bacallar y Sanna that was one of the founders of the Real Academia Española; according to Bruno Anatra's estimates, around 87% of the books printed in Cagliari were in Spanish.
A notable exception was Pedro Delitala (1550–1590), who decided to write in Italian instead.Rime diverse, Cagliari, 1595 Nonetheless, the Sardinian language retained much of its importance, earning respect from the Spaniards in light of it being the ethnic code the people from most of the Kingdom kept using, especially in the interior.Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, Giorgia Ingrassia (edited by).
Storia della lingua sarda: dal paleosardo alla musica rap, evoluzione storico-culturale, letteraria, linguistica.
Scelta di brani esemplari commentati e tradotti, 2009, Cuec, Cagliari, p. 99Juan Francisco Carmona Cagliari, 1610–1670, Alabança de San George obispu suelense: Citizen (in Spanish): "You, shepherd!
What frightens you?
Have you never seen some people gathering?"; Shepherd (in Sardinian): "Are you asking me if I'm married?"; Citizen (in Spanish): "You're not getting a grasp of what I say, do you?
Oh, what an idiot shepherd!"; Shepherd (in Sardinian): "I'm actually thirsty and tired"; Citizen (in Spanish): "I'd better speak in Sardinian so that we understand each other better. (in Sardinian)
Tell me, shepherd, where are you from?"; Shepherd: "I'm from Suelli, my lord, I've been ordered to bring my lord a present"; Citizen: "Ah, now you understand what I said, don't you!"".
("Ciudadano: Que tiens pastor, de que te espantas?
que nunca has visto pueblo congregado?
; Pastor: E ite mi nais, si seu coiadu?
; Ciudadano: Que no me entiendes?
o, que pastor bozal aqui me vino; Pastor: A fidi tengu sidi e istau fadiau; Ciudadano: Mejor sera que en sardo tambien able pues algo dello se y nos oigamos.
Nada mi su pastori de undi seis?
; Pastor: De Suedi mi Sennori e m'anti cumandadu portari unu presenti a monsignori; Ciudadano: Jmoi jà mi jntendeis su que apu nadu").
New genres of popular poetry were established around this period, like the  or  (sacred hymns), the  (lullabies), the  (funeral laments), the  (quatrains), the  and  (curses), and the improvised poetry of the  and .
Sardinian was also one of the few official languages, along with Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese, whose knowledge was required to be an officer in the Spanish tercios.: "Los tercios españoles solo podían ser comandados por soldados que hablasen castellano, catalán, portugués o sardo.
Cualquier otro tenía vedado su ascenso, por eso los italianos que chapurreaban español se hacían pasar por valencianos para intentar su promoción."
; "The Spanish tercios could only be commanded by soldiers who spoke Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese or Sardinian.
Everyone else had his promotion forbidden, that's why the Italians who spoke Spanish badly tried to pass themselves off as Valencians to try to get promoted."
Ioan Matheu Garipa, a priest from Orgosolo who translated the Italian  into Sardinian () in 1627, was the first author to claim that Sardinian was the closest living relative of classical Latin«In this Roman Court, having come into possession of a book in Italian, a new edition […]
I have translated it into Sardinian to give news of it to the devotees of my homeland who are eager to know these legends.
I have translated them into Sardinian, rather than into another language, out of love for the people […] who did not need an interpreter to enunciate them, and also because of the fact that the Sardinian language is noble by virtue of its participation in Latinity, since no language spoken is as close to classical Latin as Sardinian. […]
Since, if the Italian language is much appreciated, and if among all the vernacular languages is in first place for having much followed in the footsteps of Latin, no less should the Sardinian language be appreciated considering that it is not only a relative of Latin, but is largely straightforward Latin. […]
And even if this were not so, it is sufficient reason to write in Sardinian to see that all nations write and print books in their natural language, boasting of having history and moral subjects written in the vernacular, so that all may benefit from them.
And since the Sardinian Latin language is as clear and intelligible (when written, and pronounced as it should be), if not even more so, than the vulgar ones, since the Italians, and Spaniards, and all those who practice Latin in general understand it.»
Original text: «» Garipa, Ioan Matheu.
Legendariu de santas virgines, et martires de Iesu Crhistu, 1627, Per Lodouicu Grignanu, Roma and, like Araolla before him, valued Sardinian as the language of a specific ethno-national community."
Totu sas naziones iscrient e imprentant sos libros in sas propias limbas nadias e duncas peri sa Sardigna – sigomente est una natzione – depet iscriere e imprentare sos libros in limba sarda.
Una limba – sighit Garipa – chi de seguru bisongiat de irrichimentos e de afinicamentos, ma non est de contu prus pagu de sas ateras limbas neolatinas."
("All the nations write and print books in their native languages and therefore Sardinia – which is a nation – should do so as well, in Sardinian language.
A language – follows Garipa – which certainly needs a little enrichment and refinement, but is no less important than the other Neolatin languages").
Casula, Francesco.
Sa chistione de sa limba in Montanaru e oe In this regard, the philologist Paolo Maninchedda argues that by doing so, these authors did not write «about Sardinia or in Sardinian to fit into an island system, but to inscribe Sardinia and its language - and with them, themselves - in a European system.
Elevating Sardinia to a cultural dignity equal to that of other European countries also meant promoting the Sardinians, and in particular their educated countrymen, who felt that they had no roots and no place in the continental cultural system».
«...non scrivono di Sardegna o in sardo per inserirsi in un sistema isolano, ma per iscrivere la Sardegna e la sua lingua – e con esse, se stessi – in un sistema europeo.
Elevare la Sardegna ad una dignità culturale pari a quella  di altri paesi europei significava anche promuovere i sardi, e in particolare i sardi colti, che si sentivano privi di radici e di appartenenza nel sistema culturale continentale.»
Paolo Maninchedda (2000): Nazionalismo, cosmopolitismo e provincialismo nella tradizione letteraria della Sardegna (secc. XV–XVIII), in: Revista de filología Románica, 17, p. 178 Savoyard period – Italian influence
The War of the Spanish Succession gave Sardinia to Austria, whose sovereignty was confirmed by the 1713–14 treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt.
In 1717 a Spanish fleet reoccupied Cagliari, and the following year Sardinia was ceded to Victor Amadeus II of Savoy in exchange for Sicily.
This transfer would not initially entail any social nor linguistic changes, though: Sardinia would still retain for a long time its Iberian character, so much so that only in 1767 were the Aragonese and Spanish dynastic symbols replaced by the Savoyard cross.Cfr.
The Sardinian language, although practiced in a state of diglossia, continued to be spoken by all social classes, its linguistic alterity and independence being universally perceived; Spanish, on the other hand, was the prestige code known and used by the Sardinian social strata with at least some education, in so pervasive a manner that Joaquin Arce (1960) refers to it in terms of a paradox: Castilian had become the common language of the islanders by the time they officially ceased to be Spanish and, through their annexation by the House of Savoy, became Italian instead.Joaquín Arce (1960), España en Cerdeña.
Aportación cultural y testimonios de su influjo, Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto «Jerónimo Zurita», p. 128 Given the current situation, the Piedmontese ruling class which held the reins of the island, in this early phase, resolved to maintain its political and social institutions, while at the same time progressively hollowing them out.
This pragmatic stance was rooted in three political reasons: in the first place, the Savoyards did not want to rouse international suspicion and followed to the letter the rules dictated by the Treaty of London, signed on 2 August 1718, whereby they had committed themselves to respect the fundamental laws of the newly acquired Kingdom; in the second place, they did not want to antagonize the hispanophile locals, especially the elites; and finally, they lingered on hoping they could one day manage to dispose of Sardinia altogether, while still keeping the title of Kings by regaining Sicily.
In fact, since imposing Italian would have violated one of the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, which the new rulers swore to observe upon taking on the mantle of King, Victor Amadeus II emphasised the need for the operation to be carried out through incremental steps, small enough to go relatively unnoticed (), as early as 1721.
Such prudence was again noted, when the King claimed that he was nevertheless not intentioned to ban either Sardinian or Spanish on two separate occasions, in 1726 and 1728.Palmarocchi, Roberto (1936).
Sardegna sabauda, v.I, Tip.
Mercantile G. Doglio, Cagliari, p. 87 The fact that the new masters of Sardinia felt at loss as to how they could better deal with a cultural and linguistic environment they perceived as alien to the Mainland,Cardia, Amos (2006).
S'italianu in Sardìnnia candu, cumenti e poita d'ant impostu: 1720–1848; poderi e lìngua in Sardìnnia in edadi spanniola, Iskra, Ghilarza, p. 86 where Italian had long been the prestige and even official language, can be deduced from the study  ("Account of the proposed ways to introduce the Italian language to this Kingdom") commissioned in 1726 by the Piedmontese administration, to which the Jesuit Antonio Falletti from Barolo responded suggesting the  ("to introduce an unknown language [Italian] through a known one [Spanish]") method as the best course of action for Italianization.Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, Giorgia Ingrassia (edited by).
Storia della lingua sarda : dal paleosardo alla musica rap, evoluzione storico-culturale, letteraria, linguistica.
Scelta di brani esemplari commentati e tradotti, 2009, Cuec, Cagliari, p. 110 In the same year, Victor Amadeus II had already said he could no longer tolerate the lack of ability to speak Italian on the part of the islanders, in view of the inconveniences that such inability was putting through for the functionaries sent from the Mainland.
Restrictions to mixed marriages between Sardinian women and the Piedmontese officers dispatched to the island, which had hitherto been prohibited by law, were at one point lifted and even encouraged so as to better introduce the language to the local population.On further information as to the role played by mixed marriages in general to spread Italian among the islanders, see  ;
In contrast to the cultural dynamics long established in the Mainland between Italian and the various Romance dialects thereof, in Sardinia the relationship between the Italian language – recently introduced by Savoy – and the native one had been perceived from the start by the locals, educated and uneducated alike, as a relationship (albeit unequal in terms of political power and prestige) between two very different languages, and not between a language and one of its dialects.
«La più diffusa, e storicamente precocissima, consapevolezza nell'isola circa lo statuto di lingua a sé del sardo, ragion per cui il rapporto tra il sardo e l'italiano ha teso a porsi fin dall'inizio nei termini di quello tra due lingue diverse (benché con potere e prestigio evidentemente diversi), a differenza di quanto normalmente avvenuto in altre regioni italiane, dove, tranne nel caso di altre minoranze storiche, la percezione dei propri "dialetti" come "lingue" diverse dall'italiano sembrerebbe essere un fatto relativamente più recente e, almeno apparentemente, meno profondamente e drammaticamente avvertito.»
The plurisecular Iberian period had also contributed in making the Sardinians feel relatively detached from the Italian language and its cultural sphere; local sensibilities towards the language were further exacerbated by the fact that the Spanish ruling class had long considered Sardinian a distinct language, with respect to their own ones and Italian as well.
«La consapevolezza di alterità rispetto all'italiano si spiega facilmente non solo per i quasi 400 anni di fila sotto il dominio ispanico, che hanno agevolato nei sardi, rispetto a quanto avvenuto in altre regioni italiane, una prospettiva globalmente più distaccata nei confronti della lingua italiana, ma anche per il fatto tutt'altro che banale che già i catalani e i castigliani consideravano il sardo una lingua a sé stante, non solo rispetto alla propria ma anche rispetto all'italiano.»
The perception of the alterity of Sardinian was also widely shared among the Italians who happened to visit the island and recounted their experiences with the local population,«Ma la percezione di alterità linguistica era condivisa e avvertita anche da qualsiasi italiano che avesse occasione di risiedere o passare nell'Isola.»  whom they often likened to the Spanish and the ancient peoples of the Orient.According to the officer Giulio Bechi, the Sardinians spoke "a horrible language, as intricate as Saracen, and sounding like Spanish."
«Lingue fuori dell'Italiano e del Sardo nessuno ne impara, e pochi uomini capiscono il francese; piuttosto lo spagnuolo.
La lingua spagnuola s'accosta molto anche alla Sarda, e poi con altri paesi poco sono in relazione. [...]
La popolazione della Sardegna pare dalli suoi costumi, indole, etc., un misto di popoli di Spagna, e del Levante conservano vari usi, che hanno molta analogia con quelli dei Turchi, e dei popoli del Levante; e poi vi è mescolato molto dello Spagnuolo, e dirò così, che pare una originaria popolazione del Levante civilizzata alla Spagnuola, che poi coll'andare del tempo divenne più originale, e formò la Nazione Sarda, che ora distinguesi non solo dai popoli del Levante, ma anche da quelli della Spagna.»
However, the Savoyard government eventually decided to directly impose Italian altogether on Sardinia on 25 July 1760,«Come data ufficiale per la estensione della lingua italiana in Sardegna viene comunemente citato il 1764, anno in cui fu emanata un'apposita carta reale per le Università, ma questa, in effetti, fu preceduta nel 1760 da un piano regio per le scuole inferiori e seguita nel 1770 da un regio editto per la magistratura.
Occorse dunque un periodo di dieci anni per rendere ufficiale, nell'isola, l'adozione dell'italiano, la cui diffusione fu da principio assai lenta anche negli ambienti colti, come attesta l'uso frequente della lingua spagnola in atti e documenti pubblici fino ai primi decenni dell'Ottocento.»
because of the Savoyards' geopolitical need to draw the island away from Spain's gravitational pull and culturally integrate Sardinia into the Italian peninsula's orbit,«L'attività riformatrice si allargò anche ad altri campi: scuole in lingua italiana per riallacciare la cultura isolana a quella del continente, lotta contro il banditismo, ripopolamento di terre e ville deserte con Liguri, Piemontesi, Còrsi.»
Roberto Almagia et al., Sardegna, Enciclopedia Italiana (1936), Treccani, "Storia" and especially Piedmont.
«L'italianizzazione dell'isola fu un obiettivo fondamentale della politica sabauda, strumentale a un più ampio progetto di assimilazione della Sardegna al Piemonte.»
Cardia, Amos (2006).
S'italianu in Sardìnnia candu, cumenti e poita d'ant impostu: 1720–1848; poderi e lìngua in Sardìnnia in edadi spanniola, Iskra, Ghilarza, p. 92«To the Savoyard functionaries, who were well into bureaucratic absolutism as well as raised to the cult of orderliness and precision, the island looked like something alien and bizarre, like a Country that was prey to barbarism and anarchy, populated by savages who were anything but nice.
It was unlikely that the functionaries could regard anything different as other than utter evil.
They therefore proceeded to apply to Sardinia the same formulas of Piedmont.»
Original text: «Ai funzionari sabaudi, inseriti negli ingranaggi dell'assolutismo burocratico ed educati al culto della regolarità e della precisione, l'isola appariva come qualcosa di estraneo e di bizzarro, come un Paese in preda alla barbarie e all'anarchia, popolato di selvaggi tutt'altro che buoni.
Era difficile che quei funzionari potessero considerare il diverso altrimenti che come puro negativo.
E infatti essi presero ad applicare alla Sardegna le stesse ricette applicate al Piemonte.».
Guerci, Luciano (2006).
L'Europa del Settecento : permanenze e mutamenti , UTET, p. 576«En aquest sentit, la italianització definitiva de l'illa representava per a ell l'objectiu més urgent, i va decidir de contribuir-hi tot reformant les Universitats de Càller i de Sàsser, bandejant-ne alhora els jesuïtes de la direcció per tal com mantenien encara una relació massa estreta amb la cultura espanyola.
El ministre Bogino havia entès que només dins d'una Universitat reformada podia crear-se una nova generació de joves que contribuïssin a homogeneïtzar de manera absoluta Sardenya amb el Piemont.»
Joan Armangué i Herrero, Represa i exercici de la consciència lingüística a l'Alguer (ss.XVIII-XX), Arxiu de Tradicions de l'Alguer, Cagliari, I.1King Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia, Royal Note, 23 July 1760: "Since we must use for such teachings (lower schools), among the most cultured languages, the one that is the less distant from the native dialect and the most appropriate to public administration at the same time, we have decided to use Italian in the aforementioned schools, as it is in fact no more different from the Sardinian language than the Spanish one, and indeed the most educated Sardinians have already a grasp of it; it is also the most viable option to facilitate and increase trade; the Piedmontese in the Kingdom won't have to learn another language to be employed in the public sector, and the Sardinians could also find work on the continent."
Original: "Dovendosi per tali insegnamenti (scuole inferiori) adoperare fra le lingue più colte quella che è meno lontana dal materno dialetto ed a un tempo la più corrispondente alle pubbliche convenienze, si è determinato di usare nelle scuole predette l'italiana, siccome quella appunto che non essendo più diversa dalla sarda di quello fosse la castigliana, poiché anzi la maggior parte dei sardi più colti già la possiede; resta altresì la più opportuna per maggiormente agevolare il commercio ed aumentare gli scambievoli comodi; ed i Piemontesi che verranno nel Regno, non avranno a studiare una nuova lingua per meglio abituarsi al servizio pubblico e dei sardi, i quali in tal modo potranno essere impiegati anche nel continente.Girolamo Sotgiu (1984), Storia della Sardegna Sabauda, Editori Laterza In 1764, the order was extended to all sectors of public life.Bolognesi, Roberto;
Heeringa, Wilbert.
Sardegna fra tante lingue, p. 25, 2005, Condaghes Spanish was thus replaced as the official language (even though it continued to be used in the parish registers and official deeds until 1828Caria, Clemente (1981).
Canto sacro-popolare in Sardegna, Oristano, S'Alvure, p. 45) and Sardinian was again marginalized, making way for the Italianization of the island.
For the first time, in fact, even the wealthy and most powerful families of rural Sardinia, the , started to perceive Sardinian as a handicap.
At the end of the 18th century, following the trail of the French revolution, a group of the Sardinian middle class planned to break away from the mainland ruling class and institute an independent Sardinian Republic under French protection; all over the island, a number of political pamphlets printed in Sardinian were illegally distributed, calling for a mass revolt against the Piedmontese rule and the barons' abuse.
The most famous literary product born out of such political unrest was the poem , noted as a testament of the French-inspired democratic and patriotic values, as well as Sardinia's situation under feudalism.Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, Giorgia Ingrassia (edited by).
Storia della lingua sarda: dal paleosardo alla musica rap, evoluzione storico-culturale, letteraria, linguistica.
Scelta di brani esemplari commentati e tradotti, 2009, Cuec, Cagliari, p. 127
The first systematic study on the Sardinian language was written in 1782 by the philologist Matteo Madau, with the title of .Madau, Matteo (1782).
Saggio d'un opera intitolata Il ripulimento della lingua sarda lavorato sopra la sua analogia colle due matrici lingue, la greca e la latina, Bernardo Titard, Cagliari The patriotic intention that motivated Madau was to trace the ideal path through which Sardinian could grow to be the island's proper national language;Un arxipèlag invisible: la relació impossible de Sardenya i Còrsega sota nacionalismes, segles XVIII-XX – Marcel Farinelli, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Institut Universitari d'Història Jaume Vicens i Vives, p. 285 nevertheless, the Savoyard climate of repression on Sardinian culture would induce Matteo Madau to veil its radical proposals with some literary devices, and the author was eventually unable to ever translate them into reality.
The first volume of comparative Sardinian dialectology was produced in 1786 by the Catalan Jesuit Andres Febres, known in Italy and Sardinia by the pseudonym of , who returned from Lima where he had first published a book of Mapuche grammar in 1764.
After he moved to Cagliari, he became fascinated with the Sardinian language as well and conducted some research on three specific dialects; the aim of his work, entitled ,Febres, Andres (1786).
Prima grammatica de' tre dialetti sardi , Cagliari [the volume can be found in Cagliari's University Library, Baille Collection, ms. 11.2.K., n.18] was to «write down the rules of the Sardinian language» and spur the Sardinians to «cherish the language of their Homeland, as well as Italian».
The government in Turin, which had been monitoring Febres' activity, decided that his work would not be allowed to be published: Victor Amadeus III had supposedly not appreciated the fact that the book had a bilingual dedication to him in Italian and Sardinian, a mistake that his successors, while still echoing back to a general concept of "Sardinian ancestral homeland", would from then on avoid, and making exclusive use of Italian to produce their works.
In the climate of monarchic restoration that followed Angioy's rebellion, other Sardinian intellectuals, all characterized by an attitude of general devotion to their island as well as proven loyalty to the House of Savoy, posed in fact the question of the Sardinian language, while being careful enough to use only Italian as a language to get their point across.
During the 19th century in particular, the Sardinian intellectuality and ruling class found itself divided over the adherence to the Sardinian national values and the allegiance to the new Italian nationality, toward which they eventually leaned in the wake of the abortive Sardinian revolution.
«Nel caso della Sardegna, la scelta della patria italiana è avvenuta da parte delle élite legate al dominio sabaudo sin dal 1799, in modo esplicito, più che altro come strategia di un ceto che andava formandosi attraverso la fusione fra aristocrazia, nobiltà di funzione e borghesia, in reazione al progetto antifeudale, democratico e repubblicano della Sarda rivoluzione.»
Mongili, Alessandro.
Topologie postcoloniali.
Innovazione e modernizzazione in Sardegna, Condaghes, chpt.
1.2 "indicibile è il sardo" The identity crisis of the Sardinian ruling class, and their strive for acceptance into the new citizenship of the Italian identity, would manifest itself with the publication of the so-called  by the unionist and reactionary historian Pietro Martini in 1863.
A few years after the major anti-Piedmontese revolt, in 1811, the priest Vincenzo Raimondo Porru published a timid essay of Sardinian grammar, which, however, referred expressively to the Southern dialect (hence the title of Saggio di grammatica sul dialetto sardo meridionale dedicato a sua altezza reale Maria Cristina di Bourbon infanta delle Sicilie duchessa del genevese, Cagliari, Reale stamperia, 1811) and, out of prudence towards the king, was made with the declared intention of easing the acquisition of Italian among his fellow Sardinians, instead of protecting their language.
«[Il Porru] In generale considera la lingua un patrimonio che deve essere tutelato e migliorato con sollecitudine.
In definitiva, per il Porru possiamo ipotizzare una probabilmente sincera volontà di salvaguardia della lingua sarda che però, dato il clima di severa censura e repressione creato dal dominio sabaudo, dovette esprimersi tutta in funzione di un miglior apprendimento dell'italiano.
Siamo nel 1811, ancora a breve distanza dalla stagione calda della rivolta antifeudale e repubblicana, dentro il periodo delle congiure e della repressione.»
The more ambitious work of the professor and senator Giovanni Spano, the Ortographia sarda nationale ("Sardinian National Orthography"), although it was officially meant for the same purpose as Porru's,In Spano's dedication to Charles Albert's wife, out of devotion to the new rulers, there are several passages in which the author sings the praises of the Savoyards and their cultural policies pursued in Sardinia, such as "It was destiny that the sweet Italian tongue, although born on the pleasant banks of the Arno, would one day also become rich heritage of the Tirso's inhabitants" (p. 5) and, formulating a vow of loyalty to the new dynasty of regents that followed the Spanish ones, "Sardinia
owes so much to the most August HOUSE OF SAVOY, which, once the Hispanic domination had ceased, so wisely promoted the development of science, and also commanded during the middle of the last century, that Tuscan be made the language of the Dicasteries and public education" (p. 6).
The Preface, entitled Al giovanetto alunno, states the intention, already common to Porru, to publish a work dedicated to the teaching of Italian, through the differences and similarities provided by another language more familiar to the Sardinian subjects.
attempted in reality to establish a unified Sardinian orthography based on Logudorese, just like Florentine had become the basis for Italian.
«Il presente lavoro però restringesi propriamente al solo Logudorese ossia Centrale, che questo forma la vera lingua nazionale, la più antica ed armoniosa e che soffrì alterazioni meno delle altre».
Ispanu, Johanne (1840).
Ortographia sarda nationale o siat grammatica de sa limba logudoresa cumparada cum s'italiana, p. 12«[...]
Nonetheless, the two works by Spano are of extraordinary importance, as they put on the table in Sardinia the "question of the Sardinian language", the language that should have been the unified and unifying one, to be enforced on the island over its singular dialects; the language of the Sardinian nation, through which the island was keen to project itself onto the other European nations, that already reached or were about to reach their political and cultural actualization in the 1800s, including the Italian nation.
And just along the lines of what had been theorized and put into effect in favour of the Italian nation, that was successfully completing the process of linguistic unification by elevating the Florentine dialect to the role of "national language", so in Sardinia the long-desired "Sardinian national language" was given the name of "illustrious Sardinian".»
Original: «[...]
Ciononostante le due opere dello Spano sono di straordinaria importanza, in quanto aprirono in Sardegna la discussione sul problema della lingua sarda, quella che sarebbe dovuta essere la lingua unificata ed unificante, che si sarebbe dovuta imporre in tutta l'isola sulle particolarità dei singoli dialetti e suddialetti, la lingua della nazione sarda, con la quale la Sardegna intendeva inserirsi tra le altre nazioni europee, quelle che nell'Ottocento avevano già raggiunto o stavano per raggiungere la loro attuazione politica e culturale, compresa la nazione italiana.
E proprio sulla falsariga di quanto era stato teorizzato ed anche attuato a favore della nazione italiana, che nell'Ottocento stava per portare a termine il processo di unificazione linguistica, elevando il dialetto fiorentino e toscano al ruolo di "lingua nazionale", chiamandolo italiano illustre, anche in Sardegna l'auspicata lingua nazionale sarda fu denominata sardo illustre"».
Introduction
The jurist Carlo Baudi di Vesme claimed that the suppression of Sardinian and the imposition of Italian was desirable to make the islanders into "civilized Italians"."
It would be a great innovation, with regard to both the civilizing process of Sardinia and the public education, to ban the Sardinian dialects in every social and ecclesiastical activity, mandating the use of the Italian language...
At the moment, Sardinian is used to make announcements, and to sing the songs of the Saints (Goccius), some of them without any decency...
It is also necessary to eradicate the Sardinian dialect [sic] and introduce the Italian language in its place even for other reasons, which are not less important; that is, to civilize that nation [Sardinia], so that they are able to comprehend the Government's instructions and commands,... and remove one of the biggest differences between Sardinia and the Mainland states, as well."
Original text (in Italian): "Una innovazione in materia di incivilimento della Sardegna e d’istruzione pubblica, che sotto vari aspetti sarebbe importantissima, si è quella di proibire severamente in ogni atto pubblico civile non meno che nelle funzioni ecclesiastiche, tranne le prediche, l’uso dei dialetti sardi, prescrivendo l’esclusivo impiego della lingua italiana.
Attualmente in sardo si gettano i così detti pregoni o bandi; in sardo si cantano gl'inni dei Santi (Goccius), alcuni dei quali privi di dignità [...]
È necessario inoltre scemare l’uso del dialetto sardo [sic] ed introdurre quello della lingua italiana anche per altri non men forti motivi; ossia per incivilire alquanto quella nazione, sì affinché vi siano più universalmente comprese le istruzioni e gli ordini del Governo,... sì finalmente per togliere una delle maggiori divisioni, che sono fra la Sardegna e i Regi stati di terraferma."
«In una sua opera del 1848 egli mostra di considerare la situazione isolana come carica di pericoli e di minacce per il Piemonte e propone di procedere colpendo innanzitutto con decisione la lingua sarda, proibendola cioè "severamente in ogni atto pubblico civile non meno che nelle funzioni ecclesiastiche, tranne le prediche".
Baudi di Vesme non si fa illusioni: l'antipiemontesismo non è mai venuto meno nonostante le proteste e le riaffermazioni di fratellanza con i popoli di terraferma; si è vissuti anzi fino a quel momento - aggiunge - non in attesa di una completa unificazione della Sardegna al resto dello Stato ma addirittura di un "rinnovamento del novantaquattro", cioè della storica "emozione popolare" che aveva portato alla cacciata dei Piemontesi.
Ma, rimossi gli ostacoli che sul piano politico-istituzionale e soprattutto su quello etnico e linguistico differenziano la Sardegna dal Piemonte, nulla potrà più impedire che l'isola diventi un tutt'uno con gli altri Stati del re e si italianizzi davvero».
Federico Francioni, Storia dell'idea di "nazione sarda", in  The primary and tertiary education was thus offered exclusively through Italian, importing teachers from the Mainland to make up for the lack of Italian-speaking Sardinians,Cardia, Amos (2006).
S'italianu in Sardìnnia candu, cumenti e poita d'ant impostu: 1720–1848; poderi e lìngua in Sardìnnia in edadi spanniola, Iskra, Ghilarza, p. 89 and Piedmontese cartographers replaced many Sardinian place names with Italian ones.
The Italian education, being imparted in a language the Sardinians were not familiar with,Andrea Manca dell'Arca, an agronomist from Sassari (a city which, like most of Northern Sardinia, had been historically more exposed via Corsica to the Italian culture than the rest of the island) had so illustrated how Italian was still perceived by the locals: "Italian is as familiar to me as Latin, French or other foreign languages which one only partially learns through grammar study and the books, without fully getting the hang of them"[...]
(Original text: [...]
È tanto nativa per me la lingua italiana, come la latina, francese o altre forestiere che solo s’imparano in parte colla grammatica, uso e frequente lezione de’ libri, ma non-si possiede appieno[...]).
Ricordi di Santu Lussurgiu di Francesco Maria Porcu in Santu Lussurgiu dalle Origini alla "Grande Guerra" – Grafiche editoriali Solinas – Nuoro, 2005 spread Italian for the first time in history to Sardinian villages, marking the troubled transition to the new dominant language; the school environment, which employed Italian as the sole means of communication, grew to become a microcosm around the then-monolingual Sardinian villages.The introduction of Italian as a foreign language to the Sardinian villages is exemplified in a passage from the contemporary Francesco (Frantziscu) Masala's Sa limba est s'istoria de su mundu; Condaghe de Biddafraigada ("The language is the world's history; Biddafraigada's Condaghe"), Condaghes, p. 4: "A sos tempos de sa pitzinnìa, in bidda, totus chistionaiamus in limba sarda.
In domos nostras no si faeddaiat atera limba.
E deo, in sa limba nadìa, comintzei a connoscher totu sas cosas de su mundu.
A sos ses annos, intrei in prima elementare e su mastru de iscola proibeit, a mie e a sos fedales mios, de faeddare in s'unica limba chi connoschiamus: depiamus chistionare in limba italiana, «la lingua della Patria», nos nareit, seriu seriu, su mastru de iscola.
Gai, totus sos pitzinnos de 'idda, intraian in iscola abbistos e allirgos e nde bessian tontos e cari-tristos."
("When I was a little kid growing up in the village, we all used to speak in the Sardinian language.
We did not speak any other language in our homes.
And I began to know all the things of the world in the native language.
At the age of six, I went to first grade and the school teacher forbade me as well as my peers to speak in the only language we knew: from that moment on, we only had to speak in Italian, «the language of the Fatherland», he told us seriously.
Thus, the children of our village would come to school bright and happy, and walk out of school empty-headed and with a gloomy look on our faces.")
In 1811, the canon Salvatore Carboni published in Bologna the polemic book  ("Holy Discourses in Sardinian language"), wherein the author lamented the fact that Sardinia, «» ("Being an Italian province nowadays, [Sardinia] cannot have laws and public acts made in its own language"), and while claiming that «» ("the Sardinian language, however unofficial, will last as long as Sardinia among the Sardinians"), he also asked himself «» ("Why should we show neglect and contempt for Sardinian, which is a language as ancient and noble as Italian, French and Spanish?").
In  Eventually, Sardinian came to be perceived as  / , literally translating into English as "the language of hunger" (i.e. the language of the poor), and Sardinian parents strongly supported the teaching of the new tongue to their children, since they saw it as the portal to escaping from a poverty-stricken, rural, isolated and underprivileged life.
In 1827, the historical legal code serving as the consuetud de la nació sardesca in the days of the Iberian rule, the Carta de Logu, was abolished and replaced by the more advanced Savoyard code of Charles Felix "Leggi civili e criminali del Regno di Sardegna", written in Italian.
«Des del seu càrrec de capità general, Carles Fèlix havia lluitat amb mà rígida contra les darreres actituds antipiemonteses que encara dificultaven l'activitat del govern.
Ara promulgava el Codi felicià (1827), amb el qual totes les lleis sardes eren recollides i, sovint, modificades.
Pel que ara ens interessa, cal assenyalar que el nou codi abolia la Carta de Logu – la «consuetud de la nació sardesca», vigent des de l'any 1421 – i allò que restava de l'antic dret municipalista basat en el privilegi.»
Joan Armangué i Herrero, Represa i exercici de la consciència lingüística a l'Alguer (ss.XVIII-XX), Arxiu de Tradicions de l'Alguer, Cagliari, I.1 The Perfect Fusion with the Mainland States, enacted under the auspices of a «transplant, without any reserves and obstacles, [of] the culture and civilization of the Italian Mainland to Sardinia»,«Il trapiantamento in Sardegna, senza riserve ed ostacoli, della civiltà e cultura continentale, la formazione d’una sola famiglia civile, composta di Liguri, Piemontesi, Sardi, e Savoiardi, sotto un solo Padre meglio che Re, il Grande Carlo Alberto.»
would result in the loss of the island's residual autonomy and marked the moment when «the language of the "Sardinian nation" lost its value as an instrument with which to ethnically identify a particular people and its culture, to be codified and cherished, and became instead one of the many regional dialects subordinated to the national language».
«...la ‘lingua della sarda nazione’ perse il valore di strumento di identificazione etnica di un popolo e della sua cultura, da codificare e valorizzare, per diventare uno dei tanti dialetti regionali subordinati alla lingua nazionale.»
Dettori, Antonietta, 2001.
Sardo e italiano: tappe fondamentali di un complesso rapporto, in Argiolas, Mario; Serra, Roberto.
Limba lingua language: lingue locali, standardizzazione e identità in Sardegna nell’era della globalizzazione, Cagliari, CUEC, p. 88 Despite the long-term assimilation policy, the anthem of the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia would still be S'hymnu sardu nationale ("the Sardinian National Anthem"), also known as Cunservet Deus su Re ("God save the King"), before it was de facto replaced by the Italian Marcia Reale as well, in 1861.
However, even when the island became part of the Kingdom of Italy under Victor Emmanuel II in 1861, Sardinia's distinct culture from the now unified Mainland made it an overall neglected province within the newly proclaimed unitary nation state."
In 1861 Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of Italy, and the island became part of the unified Italian state.
Sardinia's distinct language and culture as well as its geographic isolation from the Italian mainland, made it something of a forgotten province, however."
During the mobilization for World War I, the Italian Army compelled all people that were "of Sardinian stock" () to enlist as Italian subjects and established the Sassari Infantry Brigade on 1 March 1915 at Tempio Pausania and Sinnai.
Unlike the other infantry brigades of Italy, Sassari's conscripts were only Sardinians (including many officers).
It is currently the only unit in Italy with an anthem in a language other than Italian: Dimonios ("Devils"), written in 1994 by Luciano Sechi.
Its title derives from Rote Teufel (German for "red devils").
However, compulsory military service played a role in language shift.
The Sardinian-born philosopher Antonio Gramsci commented on the Sardinian linguistic question while writing a letter to his sister Teresina; Gramsci was aware of the long-term ramifications of language shift, and suggested that Teresa let her son acquire Sardinian with no restriction, because doing otherwise would result in "putting his imagination into a straitjacket" as well as him ending up eventually "learning two jargons, and no language at all".
Eventually, under Fascism, Sardinia would be violently forced to align with the Italian national system, by means of cultural assimilation via the combined role of the school and the party system and repression of the local cultural expressions,«Il ventennio fascista segnò per la Sardegna l'ingresso nel sistema nazionale.
Il centralismo esasperato del governo fascista riuscì, seppure - come si dirà - con qualche contraddizione, a tacitare le istanze regionalistiche, comprimendole violentemente.
La Sardegna fu colonialisticamente integrata nella cultura nazionale: modi di vita, costumi, visioni generali, parole d'ordine politiche furono imposte sia attraverso la scuola (dalla quale partì un'azione repressiva nei confronti della lingua sarda), sia attraverso l'organizzazione del partito (che accompagnò, come in ogni altra regione d'Italia, i sardi dalla prima infanzia alla maturità, oltre tutto coinvolgendo per la prima volta - almeno nelle città - anche le donne).
La trasformazione che ne seguì fu vasta e profonda. [...]
Il prezzo che si pagò fu altissimo: la compressione della cultura regionale, la frattura sempre più netta tra il passato dei sardi e il loro futuro italiano, la riduzione di modi di vita e di pensiero molto radicati a puro fatto di folklore.
I codici di comportamento tradizionali delle zone interne resistettero, seppure insidiati e spesso posti in crisi dalla invasione di nuovi valori estranei alla tradizione della comunità; in altre zone della Sardegna, invece, i modelli culturali nazionali prevalsero facilmente sull'eredità del passato e ciò, oltre a provocare una crisi d'identità con preoccupanti riflessi sociali, segnò una frattura non più rimarginabile tra le generazioni.»
Guido Melis, La Sardegna contemporanea, in  including Sardinia's mask festivals and improvised poetry competitions, PremessaMarcel A. Farinelli, ‘The invisible motherland?
The Catalan-speaking minority in Sardinia and Catalan nationalism’, in: Studies on National Movements, 2 (2014), p. 15Remundu Piras, Sardegna Cultura and a large number of Sardinian surnames were changed to sound more Italian.
An argument broke out between the Sardinian poet Antioco Casula (popularly known as Montanaru) and the fascist journalist Gino Anchisi, who stated that «once the region is moribund or dead», which the regime declared to be,Casula's reply to Anchisi, arguing in favour of Sardinian as the only means through which the island's "cultural reawakening" could be pursued, was never published in the newspaper L'Unione Sarda, whose editorial staff properly censored it in accordance with the regime's directives.
The newspaper then justified itself in the following way, in a personal letter addressed to Casula on 12 September: «Your article could not be published because part of it clearly exalts the region too much.
This is absolutely forbidden by the current provisions of the Head of Government's press office, which specifically state: 'In no way and for no reason does the region exist'.
We are very sorry.
However, we would ask you to redo the article by simply talking about your poetry in dialect [sic] without touching on this dangerous subject!»  «so will the dialect (sic)», which was interpreted as «the region's revealing spiritual element»; in the wake of this debate, Anchisi managed to have Sardinian banned from the printing press, as well.
The significance of the Sardinian language as it was posed by Casula, in fact, lent itself to potentially subsersive themes, being tied to the practices of cultural resistance of an indigenous ethnic group, whose linguistic repertoire had to be introduced in school to preserve a "Sardinian personality" and regain "a dignity" perceived to have been lost in the process.
«Il diffondere l’uso della lingua sarda in tutte le scuole di ogni ordine e grado non è per gli educatori sardi soltanto una necessità psicologica alla quale nessuno può sottrarsi, ma è il solo modo di essere Sardi, di essere cioè quello che veramente siamo per conservare e difendere la personalità del nostro popolo.
E se tutti fossimo in questa disposizione di idee e di propositi ci faremmo rispettare più di quanto non-ci rispettino.»
Another famed poet from the island, Salvatore (Bore) Poddighe, fell into a severe depression and took his own life a few years after his masterwork (Sa Mundana Cummedia) had been seized by Cagliari's police commissioner.Poddighe, Salvatore.
Sa Mundana Cummédia, p. 32, Domus de Janas, 2009,  When the use of Sardinian in school was banned in 1934 as part of a nation-wide educational plan against the alloglot "dialects", the then Sardinian-speaking children were confronted with another means of communication that was supposed to be their own from then onwards.Bolognesi, Roberto.
The Phonology of Campidanian Sardinian: A Unitary Account of a Self-organizing Structure, 1998, 6 On a whole, this period saw the most aggressive cultural assimilation effort by the central government,«La politica di assimilazione culmina nel ventennio fascista, ma si protrae nel secondo dopoguerra, dove l’abbandono del sardo a favore dell’italiano viene favorito anche dalla crescente mobilità e dalla diffusione dei mass-media.»
which led to an even further sociolinguistic degradation of Sardinian.
While the interior managed to at least partially resist this intrusion at first, everywhere else the regime proceeded to thoroughly supplant the local cultural models with new ones foreign to the community and compress the former into a matter of folklore, marking a severance from the island's heritage that engendered, according to Guido Melis, «an identity crisis with worrying social repercussions», as well as «a rift that could no longer be healed through the generations».
However, the Sardinian Anthem of the Savoyard Kingdom was a chance to use a regional language without penalty: as a royal tradition, it could not be forbidden.
Present situation
After World War II, awareness around the Sardinian language and the danger of its slipping away did not seem to concern the Sardinian elites and entered the political spaces later than in other European peripheries marked by the presence of local ethno-linguistic minorities; Sardinian was in fact dismissed by the middle class, as both the Sardinian language and culture were still being held responsible for the island's underdevelopment.
The Sardinian ruling class, drawn to the Italian modernisation stance on Sardinia's desirable path to social "development", believed in fact that the latter had been held back by the islanders' "traditional practices", and that social and cultural progress could only be brought about through their rejection.Fiorenzo Caterini, La mano destra della storia.
La demolizione della memoria e il problema storiografico in Sardegna, Carlo Delfino Editore, p. 99«Le argomentazioni sono sempre le stesse, e sostanzialmente possono essere riassunte con il legame a loro avviso naturale tra la lingua sarda, intesa come la lingua delle società tradizionali, e la lingua italiana, connessa ai cosiddetti processi di modernizzazione.
Essi hanno interiorizzato l'idea, molto rozza e intellettualmente grossolana, che essere italofoni è essere "moderni".
La differenza tra modernità e tradizione è ai loro occhi di sostanza, si tratta di due tipi di società opposti per natura, in cui non-esiste continuità di pratiche, di attori, né esistono forme miste.»
As the language bore an increasing amount of stigmatisation and came to be perceived as an undesirable identity marker, the Sardinians have been encouraged to part with it by way of linguistic assimilation.
«La tendenza che caratterizza invece molti gruppi dominati è quella di gettare a mare i segni che indicano la propria appartenenza a un'identità stigmatizzata.
È quello che accade in Sardegna con la sua lingua (capp. 8–9, in questo volume).»
At the time of drafting of the statute in 1948, the national legislator in Rome eventually decided to specify the "Sardinian specialty" as a criterion for political autonomy uniquely on the grounds of local socio-economic issues; further considerations were discarded which were centred on the ascertainment of a distinct cultural, historical and geographical identity, although they had been hitherto the primary local justifications arguing for home rule,«Rimangono, invece, inspiegabilmente in ombra i problemi legati agli aspetti etnici e culturali della questione autonomistica, per i quali i consultori non mostrano alcuna sensibilità, a differenza di tutti quei teorici (da Angioy a Tuveri, da Asproni a Bellieni) che invece proprio in questo patrimonio avevano individuato il titolo primario per un reggimento autonomo.»
Antonello Mattone, Le radici dell'autonomia.
Civiltà locali e istituzioni giuridiche dal Medioevo allo Statuto speciale, in Pintore, Gianfranco (1996).
La sovrana e la cameriera: La Sardegna tra sovranità e dipendenza.
Nuoro: Insula, 13Salvi, Sergio (1974).
Le lingue tagliate, Rizzoli, p. 193 as they were looked down upon as a potential prelude to more autonomist or even more radical separatist claims; this view would be exemplified by a report of the Italian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into Banditry, which warned against a looming threat posed by "isolationist tendencies injurious to the development of Sardinian society and recently manifesting themselves in the proposal to regard Sardinian as the language of an ethnic minority".
Eventually, the special statute of 1948 settled instead to concentrate on the arrangement of state-funded plans (baptised with the Italian name of ) for the heavy industrial development of the island.
Therefore, far from generating a Statute grounded on the acknowledgment of a particular cultural identity like, for example, in the Aosta Valley and South Tyrol, what ended up resulting in Sardinia was, in the words of Mariarosa Cardia, an outcome «solely based on economic considerations, because there was not either the will or the ability to devise a strong and culturally motivated autonomy, a "Sardinian specificity" that was not defined in terms of social backwardness and economic deprivation»."
Un autonomismo nettamente economicistico, perché non si volle o non si poté disegnare un’autonomia forte, culturalmente motivata, una specificità sarda che non si esaurisse nell’arretratezza e nella povertà economica".
Cardia, Mariarosa (1998).
La conquista dell’autonomia (1943–49), in Luigi Berlinguer, Luigi e Mattone, Antonello.
La Sardegna, Torino, Einaudi, p. 749 Emilio Lussu, who admitted that he had only voted in favour of the final draft «to prevent the Statute from being rejected altogether by a single vote, even in such a reduced form», was the only member, at the session of 30 December 1946, to call in vain for the mandatory teaching of the Sardinian language, arguing that it was «a millenary heritage that must be preserved».
In the meantime, the emphasis on Italian continued, with historical sites and ordinary objects being henceforth popularised in Italian for mass consumption (e.g. the various kinds of "traditional"  cheese,  instead of ,  instead of ,  instead of  / , etc.).
The Ministry of Public Education once requested that the teachers willing to teach Sardinian be put under surveillance."
E in tempi a noi più vicini, con una nota riservata del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione – regnante Malfatti – del 13-2-1976 si sollecitano Presidi e Direttori Didattici a controllare eventuali attività didattiche- culturali riguardanti l’introduzione della lingua sarda nelle scuole.
Una precedente nota riservata dello stesso anno del 23-1 della Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri aveva addirittura invitato i capi d’Istituto a schedare gli insegnanti."
The rejection of the indigenous language and culture, along with a rigid model of Italian-language education which induced a denigration of Sardinian through corporal punishment and shaming,Roberto Bolognesi stated that in his school years in Sardinia, he «witnessed both physical and psychological abuse against monolingual Sardinian-speaking children.
The psychological violence consisted usually in calling the children "donkeys" and in inviting the whole class to join the mockery.» ()
«The State's purpose to dismiss the ethnic language was particularly evident at school in the teachers' negative attitudes; they formally and informally objected to the students' use of their local idiom at school.
The children's negative experience at school, where their language and culture were stigmatized as inferior, alienated them from school, and induced the families to teach Italian to their offspring in order for them to avoid discrimination and even harassment.»
«Come primo atto, il maestro decise di dividere la classe in due: da una parte sistemò i bambini che lui sapeva essere già "bravi", che appartenevano a famiglie di ceto e condizione superiore, che parlavano in italiano, dall'altra aggregò, ben distinti per banco, i bambini "non bravi", qualcuno più irrequieto di altri, qualche altro scalzo e che puzzava di pecora, quelli, cioè, che l'italiano non sapevano neppure cosa fosse, e che portavano addosso, ben impresso, il marchio dei figli della gleba.
Quando poi fece l'appello, con mia grande sorpresa, scoprii che per la scuola e per il maestro io non ero più "Giuanneddu" ma "Giovanni".»
has led to poor schooling for the Sardinians.
«Anche qui, per quanto riguarda le percentuali di posticipatari [ripetenti] presenti nel campione, viene rilevata una loro maggiore presenza nelle regioni settentrionali e una diminuzione costante nel passaggio dal Centro al Sud.
In Val d'Aosta sono il 31% e nelle scuole italiane della Provincia di Bolzano il 38%.
Scendendo al sud, la tendenza alla diminuzione è la stessa della scuola media, fino ad arrivare al 13% in Calabria.
Unica eccezione la Sardegna che arriva al 30%.
Le cause ipotizzate sono sempre le stesse.
La Sardegna, in controtendenza con le regioni dell'Italia meridionale, a cui quest'autore vorrebbe associarla, mostra percentuali di ripetenze del tutto analoghe a quelle di regioni abitate da altre minoranze linguistiche.»
Mongili, Alessandro (2013).
Introduction to Corongiu, Giuseppe, Il sardo: una lingua normale, Condaghes, 2013«Ancora oggi, nonostante l'eradicazione e la stigmatizzazione della sardofonia nelle generazioni più giovani, il "parlare sbagliato" dei sardi contribuisce con molta probabilità all'espulsione dalla scuola del 23% degli studenti sardi (contro il 13% del Lazio e il 16% della Toscana), e lo giustifica in larga misura anche di fronte alle sue stesse vittime (ISTAT 2010).»
Early school leaving and high school failure rates in Sardinia prompted a debate in the early Nineties on the efficaciousness of strictly monolingual education, with proposals for a focus on a comparative approach.
Claims for an autonomous solution to the Sardinian economic, social and cultural problems, which the 1948 Statute proved unable to resolve, came to the fore once again in the Sixties, with campaigns, often expressed in the form of political demands by Sardinian nationalists, to give Sardinian equal status with Italian as a means to promote cultural identity.
Antonio Simon Mossa had drawn from his past experiences across the world, including the newly independent country of Algeria,Eliseo Spiga, Il neo-sardismo, in  that Sardinians were one of the many ethnic and national minorities facing the danger of cultural assimilation,«Mossa era un intellettuale poliedrico: architetto di grande talento, insegnante, giornalista, viaggiatore instancabile.
Fin da giovane manifestò un particolare interesse verso le problematiche delle minoranze etnico-linguistiche, europee e mondiali, a rischio di estinzione e vittime di un “genocidio culturale”.
Un pericolo che incombeva anche sulla Sardegna, considerata da Mossa “un’unità o comunità etnica ben distinta dalle altre componenti dello Stato italiano”.»
and his fervor reverberated across the Sardinian society, pushing even some non-nationalist groups to take an interest in matters relating to minorities.
Although a law was passed as early as 1955 for the establishment of five professorships of Sardinian linguistics, one of the first demands for bilingualism was in fact formulated in a resolution adopted by the University of Cagliari in 1971, calling upon the national and regional authorities to recognize the Sardinians as an ethnic and linguistic minority and Sardinian as the islanders' co-official language.
«These claims have been put forward both on the political level (accompanied by demands for greater administrative autonomy) and on the academic level (the Council of the Arts Faculty in the University of Cagliari unanimously adopted in 1971 a resolution in defence of the Sardinian ethnolinguistic heritage.»
Commission of the European Communities, Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana (1986).
Linguistic Minorities in Countries Belonging to the European Community, Sardinian, p. 109«The University of Cagliari passed a resolution demanding from regional and state authorities the recognition of the Sardinians as an ethnic and linguistic minority and of Sardinian as their national language.»
Istanza del Prof. A. Sanna sulla pronuncia della Facoltà di Lettere in relazione alla difesa del patrimonio etnico-linguistico sardo.
Il prof.Antonio Sanna fa a questo proposito una dichiarazione: «Gli indifferenti problemi della scuola, sempre affrontati in Sardegna in torma empirica, appaiono oggi assai particolari e non risolvibili in un generico quadro nazionale; il tatto stesso che la scuola sia diventata scuola di massa comporta il rifiuto di una didattica inadeguata, in quanto basata sull'apprendimento concettuale attraverso una lingua, per molti aspetti estranea al tessuto culturale sardo.
Poiché esiste un popolo sardo con una propria lingua dai caratteri diversi e distinti dall'italiano, ne discende che la lingua ufficiale dello Stato, risulta in effetti una lingua straniera, per di più insegnata con metodi didatticamente errati, che non tengono in alcun conto la lingua materna dei Sardi: e ciò con grave pregiudizio per un'efficace trasmissione della cultura sarda, considerata come sub-cultura.
Va dunque respinto il tentativo di considerare come unica soluzione valida per questi problemi una forzata e artificiale forma di acculturazione dall'esterno, la quale ha dimostrato (e continua a dimostrare tutti) suoi gravi limiti, in quanto incapace di risolvere i problemi dell'isola.
È perciò necessario promuovere dall'interno i valori autentici della cultura isolana, primo fra tutti quello dell'autonomia, e "provocare un salto di qualità senza un'acculturazione di tipo colonialistico, e il superamento cosciente del dislivello di cultura" (Lilliu).
La Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell'Università di Cagliari, coerentemente con queste premesse con l'istituzione di una Scuola Superiore di Studi Sardi, è pertanto invitata ad assumere l'iniziativa di proporre alle autorità politiche della Regione Autonoma e dello Stato il riconoscimento della condizione di minoranza etnico-linguistica per la Sardegna e della lingua sarda come lingua <<nazionale>> della minoranza.
È di conseguenza opportuno che si predispongano tutti i provvedimenti a livello scolastico per la difesa e conservazione dei valori tradizionali della lingua e della cultura sarda e, in questo contesto, di tutti i dialetti e le tradizioni culturali presenti in Sardegna (ci si intende riferire al Gallurese, al Sassarese, all'Algherese e al Ligure-Carlofortino).
In ogni caso tali provvedimenti dovranno comprendere necessariamente, ai livelli minimi dell'istruzione, la partenza dell'insegnamento del sardo e dei vari dialetti parlati in Sardegna, l'insegnamento nella scuola dell'obbligo riservato ai Sardi o coloro che dimostrino un'adeguata conoscenza del sardo, o tutti quegli altri provvedimenti atti a garantire la conservazione dei valori tradizionali della cultura sarda.
È bene osservare come, nel quadro della diffusa tendenza a livello internazionale per la difesa delle lingue delle minoranze minacciate, provvedimenti simili a quelli proposti sono presi in Svizzera per la minoranza ladina fin dal 1938 (48000 persone), in Inghilterra per il Galles, in Italia per le minoranze valdostana, slovena e ultimamente ladina (15000 persone), oltre che per quella tedesca; a proposito di queste ultime e specificamente in relazione al nuovo ordinamento scolastico alto-atesino.
Il presidente del Consiglio on.
Colombo, nel raccomandare ala Camera le modifiche da apportare allo Statuto della Regione Trentino-Alto Adige (il cosiddetto "pacchetto"), <<modifiche che non-escono dal concetto di autonomia indicato dalla Costituzione>>, ha ritenuto di dover sottolineare l'opportunità "che i giovani siano istruiti nella propria lingua materna da insegnanti appartenenti allo stesso gruppo linguistico"; egli inoltre aggiungeva che "solo eliminando ogni motivo di rivendicazione si crea il necessario presupposto per consentire alla scuola di svolgere la sua funzione fondamentale in un clima propizio per la migliore formazione degli allievi".
Queste chiare parole del presidente del Consiglio ci consentono di credere che non-si voglia compiere una discriminazione nei confronti della minoranza sarda, ma anche per essa valga il principio enunciato dall'opportunità dell'insegnamento della lingua materna ad opera di insegnanti appartenenti allo stesso gruppo linguistico, onde consentire alla scuola di svolgere anche in Sardegna la sua funzione fondamentale in un clima propizio alla migliore formazione per gli allievi.
Si chiarisce che tutto ciò non è sciovinismo né rinuncia a una cultura irrinunciabile, ma una civile e motivata iniziativa per realizzare in Sardegna una vera scuola, una vera rinascita, "in un rapporto di competizione culturale con lo stato (...) che arricchisce la Nazione" (Lilliu)».
Il Consiglio unanime approva le istanze proposte dal prof.
Sanna e invita le competenti autorità politiche a promuovere tutte le iniziative necessarie, sul piano sia scolastico che politico-economico, a sviluppare coerentemente tali principi, nel contempo acquisendo dati atti a mettere in luce il suesposto stato.
Cagliari, 19 Febbraio 1971.
At a time when the Italian "modernisation plans" in Sardinia were in full swing, the Italian government was apprehensive about this deliberation by the University of Cagliari as providing the timber for further ethnic unrest in the state's peripheries.
Sergio Salvi's description of the Sardinians as a "forbidden nation" in Italy further contributed to the linguistic question gaining more notoriety at the national level.
«S. Salvi described the Sardinians as a "nazione proibita" [forbidden nation] since their status as a linguistic or ethnic minority is nowhere reflected in national or regional legislation.
His books (Salvi 1973, 1975) contributed significantly to the increased intensity in the controversy surrounding the language question.»
A first legal draft concerning Sardinian as a language to be legally put on an equal position with Italian was developed by the Sardinian Action Party in 1975.
Critical acclaim in Sardinian cultural circles followed the patriotic poem No sias isciau"O sardu, si ses sardu e si ses bonu, / Semper sa limba tua apas presente: / No sias che isciau ubbidiente / Faeddende sa limba 'e su padronu.
/ Sa nassione chi peldet su donu / De sa limba iscumparit lentamente, / Massimu si che l'essit dae mente / In iscritura che in arrejonu.
/ Sa limba 'e babbos e de jajos nostros / No l'usades pius nemmancu in domo / Prite pobera e ruza la creides.
/ Si a iscola no che la jughides / Po la difunder menzus, dae como / Sezis dissardizende a fizos bostros."
("Oh Sardinian!
If you are Sardinian and a good Sardinian as well, you should always keep your language etched in your mind: do not be like a submissive slave, speaking your master's language.
The nation that loses the gift of its own language is fated to slowly fade out of existence, especially when it does not come to its mind anymore to write and speak.
Not even at home is the language of our ancestors used anymore, for you consider it wretched and uncout.
If you do not bring it to be taught in school so as to better spread its use, from now on you are going to be stripping the Sardinian identity out of your children.")
In  ("Don't be a slave") by Raimondo () Piras some months before his death in 1977, urging bilingual education to reverse the ongoing trend of cultural De-Sardization.
Indeed, during the late 70s reports were released that Sardinian was on course of being abandoned in favour of Italian in the towns and among the younger generation.
By then, a significant shift to Italian had been noted in rural Sardinia not only in the Campidanese plain, but even in some inner areas that had been previously considered Sardinian-speaking bastions, manifesting a parallel shift of the values upon which the ethnic and cultural identity of the Sardinians was traditionally grounded.Gavino Pau, in an article published on La Nuova Sardegna (18 aprile 1978, Una lingua defunta da studiare a scuola), claimed that "per tutti l'italiano era un'altra lingua nella quale traducevamo i nostri pensieri che, irrefrenabili, sgorgavano in sardo" and went on to conclude that for the Sardinian language "abbiamo vissuto, per essa abbiamo sofferto, per essa viviamo e vivremo.
Il giorno che essa morrà, moriremo anche noi come sardi." (cit. in )
From then onwards, the use of Sardinian would continue to recede because of the strongly negative view the Sardinian community developed toward it, assuming a self-belittling attitude which has been described as the emergence of a "minority complex" fairly typical of linguistic minorities.Mura, Giovanni (1999).
Fuéddus e chistiònis in sárdu e italiánu, Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico, Nuoro, p.3 However, by the Eighties the language had become a point of ethnic pride:«It also became obvious that the polarization of the language controversy had brought about a change in the attitude towards Sardinian and its use.
Sardinian had become a symbol of ethnic identity: one could be proud of it and it served as a marker to distance oneself from the 'continentali' [Italians on the continent].»
it also became a tool through which long held grievances towards the central government's failure at delivering better economic and social conditions could be channeled.
«It also turned out that this segregation from Italian became proportionately stronger as speakers felt that they had been let down by the 'continentali' in their aspirations towards better socio-economic integration and greater social mobility.»
A contradicting tendency has been noted by observing that, while Sardinian is held in a much more positive light than before, its actual use has notably decreased and keeps doing so.
«The data in Sole 1988 point to the existence of two opposing tendencies: Sardophone speakers hold their language in higher esteem these days than before but they still use it less and less.»
A law by popular initiative for Sardinian-Italian bilingualism garnered considerable success as it kept gathering thousands of signatures, but was promptly blocked by the Italian Communist Party and thus never implemented.
The same Italian Communist Party would later propose, however, another bill of its own initiative "for the protection of the language and culture of the Sardinian people" in 1980.
«In August 1980 the Italian Communist Party (PCI) presented the regional council with another bill, and in October of that year a further proposal "for the protection of the language and culture of the Sardinian people" was put forward on the initiative of the education advisory council.»
In the end, following tensions and claims of the Sardinian nationalist movement for concrete cultural and political autonomy, including the recognition of the Sardinians as an ethnic and linguistic minority, three separate bills were eventually presented to the Regional Council in the Eighties.
In 1981, the Regional Council debated and voted for the introduction of bilingualism in Sardinia for the first time.
As pressure by a resolution of the Council of Europe continued to bear on Italian policy-makers for the protection of minorities, a Commission was appointed in 1982 to investigate the issue; the following year, a bill was presented to the Italian Parliament, but without success.
One of the first laws approved by the Sardinian legislator with respect to the protection and promotion of the Sardinian language and culture was soon rejected by the Constitutional Court in 1994, which deemed it "exorbitant in a multitude of ways with regard to the supplementary and implementing powers enjoyed by the Region in matters of education"; it was not until 1997 that Sardinian was finally recognized by the regional law (n. 26 of 15 October 1997 "Promotion and enhancement of the culture and language of Sardinia") without there being any recourse from the Italian central government; this law too, however, would prove to be more focused on the traditions and history of the Sardinian people than the language in itself.
A survey conducted by MAKNO in 1984 showed that three-fourths of the Sardinians had a positive attitude towards bilingual education (22% of the interviewees, especially in the Province of Nuoro and Oristano, wanted Sardinian to be compulsory in Sardinian schools, while 54.7% would prefer to see teaching in Sardinian as optional) and official bilingualism like in the Aosta Valley and South Tyrol (62.7% of the population were in favour, 25.9% said no and 11.4% were unsure).Pinna, M.T. Catte (1992).
Educazione bilingue in Sardegna: problematiche generali ed esperienze di altri paesi, Edizioni di Iniziative culturali, Sassari, pp.
166–174 Such consensus remains relatively stable to this day;«Se dunque il quadro delle competenze e degli usi linguistici è contraddittorio ed estremamente eterogeneo per le ragioni che abbiamo citato prima, non altrimenti si può dire per l'opinione.
Questa è generalmente favorevole a un mutamento dello status pubblico della lingua sarda e delle altre lingue della Sardegna, le vuole tutelare e vuole diffonderne l'uso, anche ufficiale.»
another survey, conducted in 2008, reported that more than half of the interviewees, 57.3%, were in favour of the introduction of Sardinian into schools alongside Italian.
More research carried out in 2010 confirmed warm reception among the students' parents to introducing Sardinian at school, even though skepticism circulated around having it taught as the vehicular language of education.
In the 1990s, there had been a resurgence of Sardinian-language music, ranging from the more traditional genres (, ,  etc.) to rock (, , ,  etc.) and even hip hop and rap (Dr. Drer e CRC Posse, Quilo, , Malam, , Menhir, Stranos Elementos, Malos Cantores, Randagiu Sardu, Futta etc.), and with artists who used the language as a means to promote the island and address its long-standing issues and the new challenges.Scarparo, S., & Stevenson, M. (2020).
Transcultural flows and marginality: Reggae and hip hop in Sardinia.
Modern Italy, 25(2), 199-212.
doi:10.1017/mit.2019.65Storia della lingua sarda, vol. 3, a cura di Giorgia Ingrassia e Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, CUEC, pp.
227–230 A few films (like Su Re, Bellas Mariposas, Treulababbu, Sonetaula etc.) have also been dubbed in Sardinian, and some others were provided with subtitles in the language.Storia della lingua sarda, vol. 3, a cura di Giorgia Ingrassia e Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, CUEC, p. 226 The first scientific work in Sardinian (), delving into the question of modern energy supplies, was written by Paolo Giuseppe Mura, Physics Professor at the University of Cagliari, in 1995.Mura, Giuseppe Paulu (1997).
Sa chistione mundiali de s'energhia : inue semus andende chin-d una tecnologia et una economia chi non-giughent respettu pro sa natura?
, Cagliari, CUEC
Eventually, sustained activism made possible the ratification by Italy of the European Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in 1998, which would be followed in 1999 by the formal recognition of twelve minority languages (Sardinian, Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovenian, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin and Occitan) through the framework law no. 482, in keeping with the spirit of Art. 6 of the Italian Constitution ("The Republic safeguards linguistic minorities by means of appropriate measures"Italian Constitution, Art. 6).
While the first section of said law states that Italian is the official language of the Republic, a number of provisions are included to normalize the use of such languages and let them become part of the national fabric.
However, Italy (along with France and Malta) has never ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Nevertheless, the law proved to be a positive step towards the legalization of Sardinian as it put at least an end to the ban on the language which had been in effect since the Italian Unification,«The legalization of the Sard language ends a ban on the language that has been in effect since Italian unification.»  and was deemed as a starting point, albeit timid, to pursue a more decentralized school curriculum for the island.
Still, some national school books (education has never fallen under the region's remits and is managed by the state at the central level) have not stopped to squeeze the language into the Italian acceptation of dialetto ("Italian dialect") in spite of its actual recognition by the state.
Sardinian is yet to be taught at school, with the exception of a few experimental occasions; Mauro Maxia noticed a lack of interest on the part of school managers, some request for Sardinian language classes notwithstanding.
Furthermore, its use has not ceased to be disincentivized as antiquated or even indicative of a lack of education,La lingua sarda oggi: bilinguismo, problemi di identità culturale e realtà scolastica, Maurizio Virdis (Università di Cagliari)  leading many locals to associate it with negative feelings of shame, backwardness, and provincialism.
«...Per la più gran parte dei parlanti, la lingua sarda è sinonimo o comunque connotato di un passato misero e miserabile che si vuole dimenticare e di cui ci si vuole liberare, è il segno della subordinazione sociale e politica; la lingua di classi più che subalterne e per di più legate a modalità di vita ormai ritenuta arcaica e pertanto non-desiderabile, la lingua degli antichi e dei bifolchi, della ristrettezza e della chiusura paesane contro l'apertura, nazionale e internazionale, urbana e civile.»
Virdis, Maurizio (2003).
La lingua sarda oggi: bilinguismo, problemi di identità culturale e realtà scolastica, cit.
in Convegno dalla lingua materna al plurilinguismo, Gorizia, 4.
Similar issues of identity have been observed in regard to the community's attitude toward what they positively perceive to be part of "modernity", generally associated with the Italian cultural sphere, as opposed to the Sardinian one, whose aspects have long been stigmatized as "primitive" and "barbarous" by the political and social institutions that ruled the island.
«Nella coscienza dei sardi, in analogia coi processi che caratterizzano la subalternità ovunque, si è costituita un'identità fondata su alcune regole che distinguono il dicibile (autonomia in politica, italianità linguistica, criteri di gusto musicali convenzionali non-sardi, mode, gastronomie, uso del tempo libero, orientamenti politici) come campo che può comprendere quasi tutto ma non-l'indicibile, cioè ciò che viene stigmatizzato come "arretrato", "barbaro", "primitivo", cioè sardo de souche, "autentico".
Questa esclusione del sardo de souche, originario, si è costituita lentamente attraverso una serie di atti repressivi (Butler 2006, 89), dalle punizioni scolastiche alla repressione fascista del sardismo, ma anche grazie alla pratica quotidiana del passing e al diffondersi della cultura di massa in epoca recente (in realtà molto più porosa della cultura promossa dall'istruzione centralizzata).»
«Centuries of foreign domination have accustomed Sardinians to the authority's negative attitude towards their language and culture, and to the necessity of the use of a foreign language for formal affairs and in formal writing.
It also triggered a negative attitude on the part of the Sardinians, if not a pervasive sense of inferiority of the Sardinian ethnic and cultural identity.
The effects of the public institutions' rejection of the local culture and idiom had a particularly strong impact on the Sardinian population after the unification of Italy, and especially with the institution of the national school system.»
A number of other factors like a considerable immigration flow from mainland Italy, the interior rural exodus to urban areas, where Sardinian is spoken by a much lower percentage of the population,Similar dynamics led the Irish language to be primarily spoken only in certain areas, known as Gaeltacht (Edwards J., Language, society and identity, Oxford, 1985) and the use of Italian as a prerequisite for jobs and social advancement actually hinder any policy set up to promote the language.
Therefore, following the model proposed by a UNESCO panel of experts in 2003, Sardinian is classified by UNESCO as a "definitely endangered" language ("children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home"),Brenzinger et all.
(2003).
Language Vitality and Endangerment, Document submitted to the International Expert Meeting on UNESCO Programme Safeguarding of Endangered Languages, Paris, p. 8 on the way to become "severely endangered" ("the language is used mostly by the grandparental generation and up").
Language use is far from stable; following the Expanded GIDS (Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale) model, Sardinian would position between 7 ("Shifting: the child-bearing generation knows the language well enough to use it among themselves but none are transmitting it to their children"M. Paul Lewis, Gary F. Simons (2010).
Assessing Endangerment: Expanding Fishman's GIDS, p. 8) and 8a ("Moribund: the only remaining active speakers of the language are members of the grandparent generation").
While an estimated 68 percent of the islanders had in fact a good oral command of Sardinian, language ability among the children has plummeted to less than 13 percent;Ai docenti di sardo lezioni in italiano, Sardegna 24 – Cultura some linguists, like Mauro Maxia, cite the low number of Sardinian-speaking children (with the notable case of a number of villages where Sardinian has ceased to be spoken altogether since 1993) as indicative of language decline, calling Sardinia a case of "linguistic suicide".
The depth of the Sardophone networks' increasing assimilation into Italian is illustrated by the latest ISTAT data published in 2017, which confirm Italian as the language that has largely taken root as the means of socialization within Sardinian families (52.1%), relegating the practice of code-switching to 31.5% and the actual use of languages other than Italian to only 15.6%; outside the social circle of family and friends, the numbers define Italian as by far the most prevalent language (87.2%), as opposed to the usage of Sardinian and other languages which has dropped to 2.8%.
Today, most people who use Sardinian as part of day-to-day life reside mainly in the sparsely populated areas in the countryside, like the mountainous region of Barbagia.
A bill proposed by the cabinet of the former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti would have further lowered the protection level of Sardinian, distinguishing between the so-called "national minorities", speaking languages protected by international agreements (German, Slovenian, French) and the "linguistic minorities" whose language is not spoken in any state other than Italy (all the other ethno-linguistic groups, including Sardinian).
This bill, which was eventually implemented but later deemed unconstitutional by the Court, triggered a reaction on the island.
Students expressed an interest in taking all (or part) of their exit examinations in Sardinian.
In response to a 2013 Italian initiative to remove bilingual signs on the island, a group of Sardinians began a virtual campaign on Google Maps to replace Italian place names with the original Sardinian names.
After about one month, Google changed the place names back to Italian.
After a signature campaign, it has been made possible to change the language setting on Facebook from any language to Sardinian.
It is also possible to switch to Sardinian even in Telegram and a number of other programs, like F-Droid, Diaspora, OsmAnd, Notepad++, Swiftkey, Stellarium, Skype, VLC media player for Android and iOS, Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 "Betsy", etc.
The DuckDuckGo search engine is available in Sardinian as well.
In 2016, the first automatic translation software from Italian to Sardinian was developed.
In 2015, all the political parties in the Sardinian regional council reached an agreement concerning a series of amendments to the old 1997 law to be able to introduce the optional teaching of the language in Sardinia's schools.
The Unified Text on the Discipline of the Regional linguistic policy was eventually approved on 27 June 2018, with the aim of setting in motion a path towards bilingual administration, contributions to bilingual mass media, publishing, IT schools and websites; it also allowed for the foundation of a Sardinian board (Consulta de su Sardu) with thirty experts that would propose a linguistic standard based on the main historical varieties, and would also have advisory duties towards the Regional body.
However, said law has yet to be followed up by the respective implementing decrees, the lack of which prevents it from being legally applicable.
Some Sardinian language activists and activist groups have also contested the law itself, considering it a political attack on Sardinian made to try to negate its uniformity and to relegate it to folklore, and also noted how its text contains a few parts that could bring the Italian government to challenge it.
In 2021 the Prosecutor of Oristano opened a Sardinian linguistic desk, both to support citizens and to provide advice and translations to magistrates and the police.
It has been the first time in Italy in which such a service has been offered to a minority language.
Although there is still not an option to teach Sardinian on the island itself, let alone in Italy, some language courses are instead sometimes available in Germany (Universities of Stuttgart, Munich, Tübingen, Mannheim etc.), Spain (University of Girona), Iceland and Czech Republic (Brno university).
Shigeaki Sugeta also taught Sardinian to his students of Romance languages at the Waseda University in Tokyo (Japan), and would even release a Sardinian-Japanese dictionary out of it.
250px|thumb|left|The Sardinian-speaking community among the other minority language groups officially recognized by Italy.
At present, the Sardinian-speaking community is the least protected one in Italy, despite being the largest minority language group officially recognized by the state.
In fact the language, which is receding in all domains of use, is still not given access to any field of public life,«Lo stato italiano che, nel passato e ancora oggi, controlla la maggioranza dei settori della sfera pubblica, è stato responsabile di aver trascurato e anche denigrato la lingua sarda.
Attraverso l'istruzione, i media e l'assenza della lingua sarda nella sfera pubblica, la popolazione locale ha assistito alla svalutazione e al disprezzo della sua lingua e della sua cultura.»
such as education (Italian–Sardinian bilingualism is still frowned upon, while the local public universities play little, if any, role whatsoever in supporting the language), politics (with the exception of some nationalist groupsLanguage and nationalism in Europe, edited by Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael, Oxford University Press, p. 178), justice, administrative authorities and public services, media,«L'utilizzo della lingua sarda nelle scuole è pressoché assente e i vari progetti realmente esistenti non sono dislocati su tutto il territorio regionale in maniera omogenea così come nei mass media, ancor più dopo la bocciatura del Senato della possibilità di inserire anche il sardo nella programmazione regionale nelle zone in cui sono presenti minoranze linguistiche.»
and cultural, ecclesiastical, economic and social activities, as well as facilities.
«Tutte le lingue dei sardi sono prive di uno status ufficiale che non-sia un mero riconoscimento legislativo, non-hanno protezione legale né supporto finanziario, e solo il sardo ha una qualche forma di codifica e di standardizzazione ma che sono sconosciute ai parlanti, nessuna è impiegata se non-episodicamente sui media, a scuola, dalla Chiesa, dall'amministrazione e dalle imprese. [...]
Ancora oggi non-esiste una Radio che trasmetta solo in sardo, né giornali, né scuole private sardofone.
Esiste pochissimo a livello di società civile.»
In a case presented to the European Commission by the then MEP Renato Soru in 2017, in which he complained of national negligence with regard to the state's own legislation in comparison to other linguistic minorities, the Commission's response pointed out to the Honourable Member that matters of language policy pursued by individual member states do not fall within its competences.
According to a 2017 report on the digital language diversity in Europe, Sardinian appears to be particularly vital on social media as part of many people's everyday life for private use, but such vitality does not still translate into a strong and wide availability of Internet media for the language.
In 2017, a 60-hour Sardinian language course was introduced for the first time in Sardinia and Italy at the University of Cagliari, although such a course had been already available in other universities abroad.Lingua sarda: "trinta prenu" per i primi due studenti, Unica.it
In 2015, the Council of Europe commented on the status of national minorities in Italy, noting the approach of the Italian government towards them with the exception of the German, French and Slovenian languages, where Italy has applied full bilingualism due to international agreements; despite the formal recognition from the Italian state, Italy does not in fact collect any information on the ethnic and linguistic composition of the population, apart from South Tyrol.
«Va però rilevato che, contrariamente alle indicazioni del Consiglio d’Europa, che raccomanda il censimento delle minoranze ai fini della tutela, in Italia un censimento ufficiale in questo senso è limitato alla regione Trentino-Alto Adige ed ai gruppi linguistici ivi riconosciuti (tedesco, italiano, ladino, cimbro e mocheno); per le altre regioni non si dispongono che di stime più o meno attendibili.»
There is also virtually no print and broadcasting media exposure in politically or numerically weaker minorites like Sardinian.
Moreover, the resources allocated to cultural projects like bilingual education, which lacks a consistent approach and offers no guarantee of continuity throughout the years,Se i ragazzi non-parlano la lingua degli anziani, Piera Serusi.
L'Unione Sarda, 8 dicembre 2017 are largely insufficient to meet "even the most basic expectations".The Council of Europe Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, Fourth Opinion on Italy, 2015
A solution to the Sardinian question being unlikely to be found anytime soon, the language has become highly endangered: even though the endogamy rate among group members seems to be very high, less than 15 per cent of the Sardinian children use the language to communicate with each other.
«Language group endogamy among the Sardinian language group is in excess of 80 per cent, but with only 14 per cent of the children using Sardinian to each other.»
it appears that the late recognition of Sardinian as a minority language on the part of the state, as well as the gradual but pervasive Italianization promoted by the latter's education system, the administration system and the media, followed by the intergenerational language replacement, made it so that the vitality of Sardinian has been heavily compromised.
The 1995 Euromosaic project, which conducted a research study on the current situation of the ethno-linguitic minorities across Europe under the auspices of the European Commission, concludes their report on Sardinian as follows:
As Matteo Valdes explains, «the island's population sees, day after day, the decline of their original languages.
They are complicit in this decline, passing on to their children the language of prestige and power, but at the same time they feel that the loss of local languages is also a loss of themselves, of their history, of their own specific identity or distinctiveness».
With cultural assimilation having already occurred,As summarized by Giulio Paulis, nowadays it is the Sardinians themselves that «identify with their language to lesser degree than other linguistic minorities in Italy, and instead they seem to identify with Italian to a higher degree than other linguistic minorities in Italy» (si identificano con loro lingua meno di quanto facciano altre minoranze linguistiche esistenti in Italia, e viceversa sembrano identificarsi con l'italiano più di quanto accada per altre minoranze linguistiche d'Italia).
Paulis, Giulio (2001).
Il sardo unificato e la teoria della panificazione linguistica, in Argiolas, Mario; Serra, Roberto, Limba lingua language: lingue locali, standardizzazione e identità in Sardegna nell’era della globalizzazione, Cagliari, CUEC, p. 16«Bisogna partire dal constatare che il processo di ‘desardizzazione’ culturale ha trovato spunto e continua a trovare alimento nella desardizzazione linguistica, e che l’espropriazione culturale è venuta e viene a rimorchio dell’espropriazione linguistica.»
Virdis, Maurizio (2003).
La lingua sarda oggi: bilinguismo, problemi di identità culturale e realtà scolastica, cit.
in Convegno dalla lingua materna al plurilinguismo, Gorizia, 6.
most of the younger generation of islanders, although they do understand some basic Sardinian, is now in fact Italian monolingual and monocultural as they are not able to speak Sardinian anymore, but simply regional Italian (known amongst Italian linguists as  or IrS) which in its lowest diastratic forms«The sociolinguistic subordination of Sardinian to Italian has resulted in the gradual degeneration of the Sardinian language into an Italian patois under the label of regional Italian.
This new linguistic code that is emerging from the interference between Italian and Sardinian is very common among the less privileged cultural and social classes.»
To access the article, click on List by languages, Sardinian, then scroll to "Sardinian in Italy" is, oftentimes derisively, nicknamed italiànu porcheddìnu (literally "swinish Italian") by native Sardinian speakers.
By contrast, it has been noted how the latter engage only in code-switching and usually take care in refraining from code-mixing between the two different languages.
Negative attitudes among native speakers have been observed towards second-language learners for speaking "poor Sardinian", an attitude considered to be ethnically grounded on the interaction of in-group and out-group dynamics.
«Benché si tratti anche qui di atteggiamenti e stereotipi in via di rapido cambiamento, va rilevato che anche essi implicano però una profonda consapevolezza dello statuto di lingua, fortemente marcata etnicamente, e non di semplice "dialetto", del sardo stesso: ciò che si può inferire da questo tipo di atteggiamenti (neanche troppo cripticamente normativi) è infatti che, così come si deve evitare di "storpiare" l'italiano, si deve evitare di "storpiare" anche il sardo, a meno che non si sia giustificati in partenza dal fatto di non essere etnicamente sardi, o non si tratti di scelte stilistiche consapevoli per particolari generi testuali/discorsivi diversi dal normale parlato quotidiano.»
In conclusion, the Sardinian language, while still being described as "viable" in 2003, continues to be adversely affected by pervasive and all-encompassing Italianization through language shift, and is thus nowadays moribund, albeit its replacement continues at a slower pace than before thanks to the commitment of those who, in various contexts, promote its revaluation in a process that has been defined by some scholars as "linguistic re-Sardization".
«La situazione del sardo in questi ultimi decenni risente da un lato degli esiti del processo di italianizzazione linguistica, profondo e pervasivo, e dall'altro di un processo che si può definire come risardizzazione linguistica, intendendo con questo una serie di passaggi che incidono sulla modifica dello status del sardo come lingua, sulla determinazione di una regola scritta, sulla diffusione del suo uso nei media e nella comunicazione pubblica e, infine, sullo sviluppo del suo uso come lingua di comunicazione privata e d'uso in set d'interazione interpersonale dai quali era stato precedentemente bandito o considerato sconveniente».
Still, arrangements for bilingualism exist only on paper and factors such as the intergenerational transmission, which remain essential in the reproduction of the ethnolinguistic group, are severely compromised because of Italianization;«Ciò nonostante non si è potuto né frenare l'italianizzazione progredente attraverso la scuola e gli ambiti ufficiali, né restituire vitalità al sardo in famiglia.
La trasmissione intergenerazionale, fattore essenziale per la riproduzione etnolinguistica, resta seriamente compromessa.»
many young speakers, who have been raised in Italian rather than Sardinian, have a command of their ethnic language which does not extend beyond a few stereotyped formulas, and even today's cohort of older Sardinian speakers is unable to carry on an entire conversation in Sardinian as their knowledge of it gets increasingly fragmented.
«Yet, it cannot be ignored that at present many young speakers, who have frequently been brought up in Italian, have a restricted active or even a merely passive command of their ethnic language.»
As of now, Sardinian seems to be viewed by the islanders as an instrument for the reappropriation of their past, rather than for its use as a means of communication for the present and future.
As the long-term future of the language looks far from secure in the present circumstances, it is possible that it shall be referred to as constituting the substratum of the one prevailing now, Italian, rather than as a living language spoken by the islanders.
«If present trends continue, it is possible that within a few generations the regional variety of Italian will supplant Sardinian as the popular idiom and that linguists of the future will be obliged to refer to Sardinian only as a substratal influence which has shaped a regional dialect of Italian rather than as a living language descended directly from Latin.»
«il sardo continua ad agire anche nelle menti dei sardi che il sardo non lo conoscono né lo parlano, che non l'hanno mai appreso e imparato; il sardo agisce se non altro nelle strutture linguistiche d'ogni livello dell'italiano regionale di Sardegna, che è il codice usato dai più (agisce nella fonetica, nella sintassi e in ampi settori del lessico)...»
Virdis, Maurizio (2003).
La lingua sarda oggi: bilinguismo, problemi di identità culturale e realtà scolastica, cit.
in Convegno dalla lingua materna al plurilinguismo, Gorizia, 6.
Phonology
Grammar
Some distinctive features typical of Sardinian include: Nouns
The plural marker is -s (from the Latin accusative plural), as in Western Romance languages like French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese and Galician: sardu, sardus "Sardinian"; pudda, puddas "hen"; margiane, margianes "fox".
In Italo-Dalmatian languages like Italian, or Eastern Romance languages like Romanian, the plural ends with -i, -e or -a.
The definite article derives from the Latin ipse: su, sa, plural sos, sas (Logudorese) and is (Campidanese).
At present, such articles are only common in Balearic Catalan and were once used in Gascon as well, whilst all the other Romance languages make use of forms derived from ille.
Verbs
Sardinian verbs are divided into three main classes, each distinguished by a different infinitive ending (-are, -ere, or -ire).
The conjugations of regular verbs in the standard language are as follows:
Syntax
Distinctive syntax features include:
A common occurrence of a left-dislocated construction: cussa cantone apo cantadu ("That song I have sung": that is, "I've sung that song").
In yes/no questions, fronting of a constituent (especially a predicative element) is required, though it is not specifically a question-formation process: Cumprendiu m'as?
("Understood me you have", that is, "Have you understood me?"), Mandicatu at?
("Eaten he/she has", that is "Has he/she eaten?"), Fattu l'at ("Done he/she has", that is "He/She's done it"), etc.
Interrogative phrases might be constructed like echo questions, with the interrogative marker remaining in underlying position: Sunt lòmpios cando? ("They arrived when?", that is, "when did they arrive?")
, Juanne at pigadu olìas cun chie? ("John has picked olives with whom?")
, etc.
Impersonal sentence constructions are commonly used to replace the passive voice, which is limited to the formal register: A Juanni ddu ant mortu rather than Juanni est istadu mortu.
The use of non de + noun: non de abba, abbardente est ("not of water brandy it+is": that is, "It is not water, but brandy."); non de frades, parent inimigos ("Not of brothers, they seem enemies": that is, "Far from being brothers, they are like enemies").
The use of ca (from quia) or chi as subordinate conjunctions: Ja nau ti l'apo ca est issa sa mere ("Already told I have you that is she the boss", that is "I've already told you that it's her the boss").
Existential uses of àer / ài ("to have") and èsser / èssi ("to be"): B'at prus de chentu persones inoghe! ("There is over a hundred people in here!")
, Nci funt is pratus in mesa ("There are the plates on the table").
Ite ("What") + adjective + chi: Ite bellu chi ses!
("You are so beautiful!").
Nominal syntagmas without having a head: Cussu ditzionariu de gregu est prus mannu de su de Efis ("That Greek dictionary is bigger than Efisio's"), Cudda machina est prus manna de sa de Juanne ("That car is bigger than John's").
Extraposition of the lexical head: Imprestami su tou de ditzionariu ("Please lend me your dictionary").
Ancu + subjunctive as a way to express a (malevolent) wish on someone: Ancu ti falet unu lampu!
("May you be struck by lightning!").
Prepositional accusative: Apo bidu a Maria ("I've seen Mary").
Insertion of the affirmative particle ja / giai: Ja m'apo corcau ("I did go to bed").
Use of the same particle to express antiphrastic formulas: Jai ses totu istudiatu, tue!
("You're so well educated!", that is, "You are so ignorant and full of yourself!").
Reflexive use of intransitive verbs: Tziu Pascale si nch'est mortuAs opposed to the transitive use of morrer / morri a..., which means "to kill" instead.
E.g.: Pascale at mortu a tziu Bachis ("Pascal has killed uncle Bachisio").
eris sero ("Uncle Pascal passed away yesterday"), Mi nch'apo dormiu pro una parica de oras ("I've slept for a couple of hours").
Use of àer in reflexive sentences: Si at fertu a s'anca traballende ("He/She injured himself/herself while working").
Combination of the perfective and progressive verb aspect: Est istadu traballende totu sa die" ("He/She has been working all day").
Continuous and progressive aspect of the verb, which is meant to indicate an effective situation rather than typical or habitual: Non ti so cumprendende ("I don't understand you").
Relative lack of adverbs: with the exception of some localized words like the Nuorese mescamente ("especially"), as well as some recent loanwords from Italian, all the Sardinian dialects have a number of ways with which to express the meaning conferred to the adverbs by the other Romance languages (e.g. Luchía currit prus a lestru / acoitendi de María, "Lucy runs faster than Mary").
The expression of the deontic modality through a periphrastic form, characterized by the verb "to want" in auxiliary position, a feature also common to Southern Corsican, Sicilian, Moroccan Arabic and Moroccan Berber, in addition to some non-standard varieties of English.
(e.g. Su dinare bolet / cheret torradu "money has to be paid back").
The condaghes seem to demonstrate that unlike other Romance languages, Old Sardinian may have had verb-initial word order, with optional topicalization into the beginning of the sentence.
While verb-initial word order is also attested in other old Romance languages, such as Old Venetian, Old French, Old Neapolitan, Old Spanish, Old Sicilian and others, it has been argued that Old Sardinian was alone in licensing verb-initial word order (V1) as the generalized word order, while the others had V1 only as a marked alternative.Wolfe, Sam.
"Verb-initial orders in Old Romance: A comparative Account."
Revue roumaine de linguistique 60.2–3 (2015): 147–172.
Vocabulary comparison with other Romance languages
Varieties
thumb|200px|right|The word for "peace" in all the varieties of Sardinian.
Historically, the Sardinians have always been quite a small population scattered across isolated cantons, sharing demographic patterns similar to the neighbouring Corsica; as a result, Sardinian developed a broad spectrum of dialects over the time.
Starting from Francesco Cetti's description in the 18th century,«Due dialetti principali si distinguono nella medesima lingua sarda; ciò sono il campidanese, e ’l dialetto del capo di sopra.»
Sardinian has been presented as a pluricentric language, being traditionally subdivided into two standardized varieties spoken by roughly half of the entire community: the dialects spoken in North-Central Sardinia, centered on the orthography known as Logudorese (su sardu logudoresu), and the dialects spoken in South-Central Sardinia, centered on another orthography called Campidanese (su sardu campidanesu).
All the Sardinian dialects differ primarily in phonetics, which does not considerably hamper intelligibility;«The phonetic differences between the dialects occasionally lead to communicative difficulties, particularly in those cases where a dialect is believed to be 'strange' and 'unintelligible' owing to the presence of phonetic peculiarities such as laryngeal or pharyngeal consonants or nazalized vowels in Campidanese and in the dialects of central Sardinia.
In his comprehensive experimental-phonetic study, however, Contini (1987) concludes that interdialectal intelligibility exists and, on the whole, works satisfactorily.»
«Queste pretese barriere sono costituite da una manciata di fenomeni lessicali e fonetico-morfologici che, comunque, non-impediscono la mutua comprensibilità tra parlanti di diverse varietà del sardo.
Detto questo, bisogna ripetere che le varie operazioni di divisione del sardo in due varietà sono tutte basate quasi esclusivamente sull'esistenza di pronunce diverse di lessemi (parole e morfemi) per il resto uguali. [...]
Come si è visto, non-solo la sintassi di tutte le varietà del sardo è praticamente identica, ma la quasi totalità delle differenze morfologiche è costituita da differenze, in effetti, lessicali e la percentuale di parole realmente differenti si aggira intorno al 10% del totale.»
the view of there being a dialectal boundary rigidly separating the two varieties of High Sardinian has been in fact subjected to more recent research, which shows a fluid linguistic continuum from the northern to the southern ends of the island.Contini, Michel (1987).
Ètude de géographie phonétique et de phonétique instrumentale du sarde, Edizioni dell'Orso, CagliariBolognesi R. & Heeringa W., 2005, Sardegna fra tante lingue.
Il contatto linguistico in Sardegna dal Medioevo a oggi, Condaghes, Cagliari«L'esistenza di una striscia di "terra di nessuno" (fatta eccezione, comunque, per i dialetti di Laconi e Seneghe) tra dialetti meridionali e settentrionali, come anche della tradizionale suddivisione della Sardegna in due "capi" politico-amministrativi oltre che, ma fino a un certo punto, sociali e antropologici (Cabu de Susu e Cabu de Jossu), ma soprattutto della popolarizzazione, condotta dai mass media negli ultimi trent'anni, di teorie pseudo-scientifiche sulla suddivisione del sardo in due varietà nettamente distinte tra di loro, hanno contribuito a creare presso una parte del pubblico l'idea che il sardo sia diviso tra le due varietà del "campidanese" e del "logudorese".
In effetti, si deve più correttamente parlare di due tradizioni ortografiche, che rispondono a queste denominazioni, mettendo bene in chiaro però che esse non-corrispondono a nessuna varietà reale parlata in Sardegna.»
Bolognesi, Roberto (2013).
Le identità linguistiche dei sardi, Condaghes, p. 93 The dualist perception of the Sardinian dialects, rather than pointing to an actual isogloss, is in fact the result of a psychological adherence to the way Sardinia was administratively subvidided into a Caput Logudori (Cabu de Susu) and a Caput Calaris (Cabu de Jossu) by the Spanish.
On the other hand, the Logudorese and Campidanese dialects have been estimated in another research to have 88% of matches in 110-item wordlist, similarly to the 85–88% number of matches between Provençal Occitan and some Catalan dialects which by some standards is usually (even though arbitrarily) considered characteristic for two different, albeit very closely related, languages.
ISO 639 counts four Sardinian languages (Campidanese, Gallurese, Logudorese and Sassarese), each with its own language code.
The dialects centered on the Logudorese model are generally considered more conservative, with the Nuorese subdialect (su sardu nugoresu) being the most conservative of all.
They have all retained the classical Latin pronunciation of the stop velars (kena versus cena, "supper"),Le occlusive velari davanti a vocale palatale, Centro di Studi Filologici Sardi the front middle vowels (compare Campidanese iotacism, probably from Byzantine Greek)et ipso quoque sermo Sardorum adhuc retinetnon pauca verba sermonis graeci atque ipse loquentium sonum graecisanum quendam prae se fert – Roderigo Hunno Baeza, Caralis Panegyricus, about 1516, manuscript preserved in the University Library of Cagliari and assimilation of close-mid vowels (cane versus cani, "dog" and gattos versus gattus, "cats").
Labio-velars become plain labials (limba versus lingua, "language" and abba versus acua, "water").Le labiovelari, Centro di Studi Filologici Sardi I is prosthesized before consonant clusters beginning in s (iscala versus Campidanese scala, "stairway" and iscola versus scola, "school").
An east-west strip of villages in central Sardinia, mainly in the central part of the Province of Oristano, and central part of the Province of Nuoro, speaks a transitional group of dialects (su sardu de mesania).
Examples include is limbas (the languages) and is abbas (the waters).
The dialects centered on the Campidanese model, spreading from Cagliari (once the metropolis of the Roman province), show relatively more influences from Carthage, Rome, Constantinople and Late Latin.
Examples include is fruminis (the rivers) and is domus (the houses).
thumb|Corso-Sardinian (orange and yellow) with regard to Sardinian proper (green).
Sardinian is the indigenous and historical language of most Sardinian communities.
However, Sardinian is not spoken as the native and primary language in a significant number of other ones, amounting to 20% of the Sardinian population; Sassari, the second-largest city on Sardinia and the main center of the northern half of the island, is amongst the latter.
The aforementioned Gallurese and Sassarese, despite being often colloquially considered part of Sardinian, are two Corso-Sardinian transitional languages; they are spoken in the northernmost part of Sardinia,Maxia, Mauro.
Studi sardo-corsi – Dialettologia e storia della lingua tra le due isole , Taphros, 2010, Olbia although some Sardinian is also understood by the majority of people living therein (73.6% in Gallura and 67.8% in the Sassarese-speaking subregion).
Francesco Cetti, responsible for the dialectal partition of the language in his early dissertation, went on to deem these Northern varieties "foreign" (i.e. not indigenous to Sardinia) and therefore "not national" (i.e. non-Sardinian) in that they would be "an Italian dialect, much more Tuscan in fact than the vast majority of Italy's dialects themselves".
«Le lingue che si parlano in Sardegna si possono dividere in istraniere, e nazionali.
Straniera totalmente è la lingua d'Algher, la quale è la catalana, a motivo che Algher medesimo è una colonia di Catalani.
Straniera pure si deve avere la lingua che si parla in Sassari, Castelsardo e Tempio; è un dialetto italiano, assai più toscano, che non la maggior parte de’ medesimi dialetti d'Italia.»
There are also two language islands, the Catalan Algherese-speaking community from the inner city of Alghero (northwest Sardinia) and the Ligurian-speaking towns of Carloforte, in San Pietro Island, and Calasetta in Sant'Antioco island (south-west Sardinia).De Concini, Wolftraud (2003).
Gli altri d'Italia : minoranze linguistiche allo specchio, Pergine Valsugana : Comune, p. 196.
Sample of text
Standardization
Until 2001, there was not a unifying orthographic standard available for all the dialects of Sardinian, neither in the literary nor in the oral domain (one designed for the latter does not exist to this day).
After the Middle Ages, where a certain orthographic uniformity can be observed, the only steps to provide the language with a single standard, called "illustrious Sardinian", were undertaken by such writers as Hieronimu Araolla, Ioan Mattheu Garipa and Matteo Madau, who had based their works on the model of medieval Sardinian.
However, attempts to formalise and spread this orthography would be hindered by the Iberian and later Savoyard authorities.
«Nel periodo giudicale si osserva una certa unitarietà del modo di scrivere il sardo, ma non si ha notizia di alcuna regolazione: la sua ufficialità era implicita e data per scontata.
Nel XVI e, poi, nel XVIII secolo, nei circoli umanisti e in quelli gesuitici, rispettivamente, si è osservato un tentativo di fornire una regolazione, ma tali tentativi furono non solo ostacolati ma anche repressi dalle autorità coloniali ispaniche e soprattutto sabaude.»
The dialectally fragmented nature of the language is such that it is popularly contended that Sardinian is divided into two or more groups, which have provided themselves with a series of traditional orthographies already, albeit with many changes over the time.
While this belief is not grounded on linguistic considerations, it is however motivated by political and social reasons.
In addition to the orthographies commonly referred to as "Logudorese" and "Campidanese", the Nuorese orthography, the Arborense one and even those restricted to individual towns were also developed, sometimes finding common ground with some general rules, such as those required by the Ozieri Award.
It is often the case, however, that speakers who are not commonly taught the Sardinian language and are thus literate only in Italian, for lack of a bilingual education, transcribe their local spelling following rules pertaining to the latter rather than the former.
However, some attempts have been made to introduce a single orthographic form for administrative purposes over the recent decades; said form does not aim to refer to morphology and syntax, which is already fairly homogeneous,Bolognesi, Roberto (2013).
Le identità linguistiche dei Sardi, Condaghes, p. 41 (Le strutture linguistiche comuni del sardo. Sintassi, pp. 42–51; Morfologia, pp. 51–55) but concerns itself primarily with spelling.
To allow for an effective implementation of the provisions on the language, as per the regional law no. 26/1997 and the national law no. 482/1999, the Sardinian Autonomous Region arranged for a commission of experts to elaborate a standard capable of overcoming the hurdle posed by the dialectal differences and thereby providing a unified writing system.
A first proposal (the LSU: Limba Sarda Unificada, published on 28 February 2001) was tabled, which identified a model language of reference (based on the analysis of local varieties of Sardinian and on the selection of the most representative and compatible models) so as to guarantee the necessary characteristics of certainty, coherence, univocity, and supra-local diffusion.
The people appointed for the task were Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, Roberto Bolognesi, Diego Salvatore Corraine, Ignazio Delogu, Antonietta Dettori, Giulio Paulis, Massimo Pittau, Tonino Rubattu, Leonardo Sole, Heinz Jürgen Wolf, and Matteo Porru acting as the Committee's secretary.
This study, although scientifically valid, has never been adopted at an institutional level: critics argued that it was an "artificial" system "imposed" on Sardinian speakers.
Nevertheless, the LSU would act as a springboard for a subsequent drafting proposal, this time drawn by a new Committee composed of Giulio Angioni, Roberto Bolognesi, Manlio Brigaglia, Michel Contini, Diego Corraine, Giovanni Lupinu, Anna Oppo, Giulio Paulis, Maria Teresa Pinna Catte and Mario Puddu.
The new project continued to be worked on, going by the name of LSC (Limba Sarda Comuna).
The new experimental standard proposal, published in 2006, was characterised by taking the mesania (transitional) varieties as reference, and welcoming elements of the spoken language so as to be perceived as a more "natural" mediation; it also ensured that the common orthography would be provided with the characteristics of over-dialectality and supra-municipality, while being open to integrating the phonetic peculiarities of the local variants.
Despite this, there was some criticism for this norm as well, both by those who proposed amendments to improve it, and by those who preferred to insist with the idea of dividing Sardinian into two macro-variants with their own separate orthographies.
The Sardinian Regional Government, with the resolution of the Regional Council n. 16/14 of 18 April 2006 "Limba Sarda Comuna.
Adoption of the reference standards of an experimental nature for the written language output of the Regional Administration", has experimentally adopted the LSC as the official orthography for the acts and documents issued by the Region of Sardinia (even if, as per Article 8 of the national Law no. 482/99, only the text written in Italian has legal value), giving citizens the right to write to the Public Administration in their own variety and establishing the regional language desk Ufitziu de sa Limba Sarda.
The resolution does not aim to impose the guide and further notes that it is "open to integrations" and that "all solutions are of equal linguistic value".
In the following years, the Region has abided by the LSC standard in the translation of many documents and resolutions and in many other areas.
In addition, the LSC standard has been adopted on a voluntary basis by many other institutions, schools and media, often in a complementary manner with orthographic norms closer to the local spelling.
Regarding these uses, a percentage estimate was made, considering only the projects financed or co-financed by the Region for the diffusion of the Sardinian language in the municipal and supra-municipal language offices, for the teaching in schools and the media from 2007 to 2013.
The monitoring, by the Sardinian Language and Culture Service of the Department of Public Education, was published on the website of the Sardinian Autonomous Region in April 2014.
Regarding the school projects financed in 2013, for example, it appears that there was a clear preference, in schools, for the use of the LSC orthographic standard together with a local spelling (51%), compared to the exclusive use of the LSC (11%) or the exclusive use of a local spelling (33%).
On the other hand, regarding the editorial projects in Sardinian language in the regional media, financed by the Region in 2012, we find a greater presence of the LSC (which could derive from a reward of 2 points in the formation of the rankings to take funding, a reward that was not present in the notice for schools).
According to those data, it appears that 35% of textual production in media projects was in LSC, 35% in LSC and in local spellings and 25% in local spellings only.
The local language offices, co-financed by the Regional Government, in 2012 used LSC in 50% of their writing, LSC together with local spelling for 9% and local spellings for 41%.
A recent research on the use of the LSC orthography in schools, carried out in the municipality of Orosei, showed that the students of the local middle school had no problem using that standard despite the fact that the Sardinian they spoke was partly different.
No pupil rejected it or considered it "artificial", a thing that proved its validity as a didactic tool.
The results were first presented in 2016 and published in an article in 2021.
See also
Help:IPA/Sardinian
Paleo-Sardinian language
Southern Romance
Traditional writing forms of Sardinian: Logudorese, Campidanese
Non-Sardinian dialects spoken on Sardinia: Sassarese, Gallurese, Algherese, Tabarchino
References
Notes
Citations
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External links
Ditzionàriu in línia de sa limba e de sa cultura sarda - Online Sardinian Dictionary (in Sardinian, Italian and English)
CROS – Curretore regionale ortogràficu sardu in lìnia (Sardinian spell checker)
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Automatic translation software from Italian and Catalan to Sardinian.
Grammar of Limba Sarda Comuna (standardized form adopted at institutional level)
The Sardinian language: Basic phrases & pronunciation, Nativlang
An extract in Sardinian from The Little Prince (archived 15 March 2018)
List of Sardinian forenames (from it.wiki)
Antoninu Rubattu's site.
In addition to vocabularies of each Sardinian variety of the language and non-Sardinian languages, the site provides the reader also with some basic grammar guides and etymology dictionaries as well.
The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Sardinian
Lessico etimologico sardo
SardegnaCultura in sardu – Sardinian version of the official cultural site from the Regional Sardinia administration.
Apertium.
Automatic translation software from Italian to Sardinian.
University of Berlin – Contains many links and other information about the language.
Grammar of Nuorese Sardinian – Wikibooks (English-incomplete)
Grammar of Nuorese Sardinian – Sardinian Wikipedia (Sardinian-incomplete)
Grammar of Nuorese Sardinian – Wikibooks (Italian-complete)
Arrègulas: Grammar of Campidanese Sardinian
A mailing list for Sardinian-speakers
Acadèmia campidanesa de sa lìngua sarda (in Campidanese Sardinian)
Memorie in lingua sarda, Sardegna Digital Library
Interactive Atlas of Romance Intonation, Sardinian from Ittiri and Sinnai
