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 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, as well as a Byzantine Greek, Catalan, Spanish and Italian superstratum. These elements originate in the political history of Sardinia, whose indigenous society experienced for centuries competition and at times conflict with a series of colonizing newcomers: before the Middle Ages, the island 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 Savoyard and contemporary Italian one, following since then the country's linguistic policies which led to diglossia. The original character of the Sardinian language among the Romance idioms has long been known among linguists. After a long strife for the acknowledgement of the island's cultural patrimony, in 1997, Sardinian, along with the other languages spoken therein, managed to be recognized by regional law in Sardinia without challenge by the central government, and in 1999, Sardinian and eleven other "historical linguistic minorities", i.e. locally indigenous, and not foreign-grown, minority languages of Italy (, as defined by the legislator) were similarly recognized as such by national law (specifically, Law No. 482/1999). Among these, Sardinian is notable as having, in terms of absolute numbers, the largest community of speakers. Although the Sardinian-speaking community can be said to share "a high level of linguistic awareness", policies eventually fostering language loss and assimilation have considerably affected Sardinian, whose actual speakers have become noticeably reduced in numbers over the last century; The Sardinian adult population would today no longer be able to carry on a single conversation in the ethnic language, as it is used exclusively by 0.6 percent of the total, and less than 15 percent of the new generations were reported to have been passed down some residual Sardinian in a deteriorated form described by linguist Roberto Bolognesi as "an ungrammatical slang". The rather fragile and precarious state in which the Sardinian language now finds itself, where its use has been discouraged and consequently reduced even within the family sphere, is illustrated by the