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, 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, leading many locals to associate it with negative feelings of shame, backwardness, and provincialism. 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. Roberto Bolognesi believes that the enduring stigmatisation of Sardinian as the language of the "socially and culturally disadvantaged" classes leads to the nurturing of a vicious circle that further promotes the language's regression, reinforcing its negative judgement among those who perceive themselves as "most competitive": "a perverse mechanism that has condemned and still condemns Sardinian speakers to social marginalisation, systematically excluding them from those linguistic and cultural interactions in which the prestigious registers and high style of language are developed, first and foremost in schools". 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, and the