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. 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. However, by the Eighties the language had become a point of ethnic pride: 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. 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. 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 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