Sardinian language

Sardinian or Sard ("sardu" / "sadru" , "limba sarda" or "lìngua sarda" ) 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 the genealogical descendants of Latin. 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 of the language originate in the political history of the island of Sardinia: 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 18th century onward, under the Italian one.
The originality of Sardinian with respect to the other Romance languages had long been known among linguists. 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 by national law (specifically, Law No. 482/1999). Among these, Sardinian is notable as having the largest number of speakers.
However, the number of native speakers has been continually declining, threatening the vitality of the Sardinian-speaking community. While it was estimated in 2007 that 68.4 percent of the inhabitants of Sardinia had a good oral command of Sardinian, most of them were past retirement age. Only 13 percent of children were reported to have this level of competence in the language, with Sardinian being kept as a heritage language. UNESCO has classified the language as "definitely endangered".
Overview.
Sardinian is considered the most conservative Romance language, and 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%. For example, Latin ""Pone mihi tres panes in bertula" (put three loaves of bread [from home] in the bag for me) would be the very similar "Ponemi tres panes in bertula"" in Sardinian.
Compared to the mainland Italian dialects, Sardinian is virtually incomprehensible for Italians, and is in fact considered a distinct linguistic group among the Romance languages.
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; attempts have also been made to draw comparisons with the Berber languages from North Africa 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 and, most evidently, the 1950s.
Origins of modern Sardinian.
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. Other sources trace instead the root "s(a)rd" from , a legendary woman from the Anatolian Kingdom of Lydia, or from the Libyan mythological figure of the Sardus Pater "Babai" ("Sardinian Father" or "Father of the Sardinians").
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. 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.
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 Naturalis Historia 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, these tribes may have in fact played a role in shaping the current regional linguistic differences of the island.
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".
The Roman domination began in 238 BC and brought Latin to Sardinia, but was often contested by the local Sardinian tribes and proved unable to completely supplant the pre-Latin Sardinian languages, including Punic, which continued to be spoken in the 4th century AD as attested by votive inscriptions. Some 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. 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. Cicero called the Sardinian rebels "latrones mastrucati" ("thieves with rough wool cloaks") to emphasize Roman superiority.
During the Roman domination Latin gradually became however the speech of the majority of the island's inhabitants. As a result of this protracted and prolonged process of Romanization, 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 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.
At that time, the only literature being produced in Sardinia was mostly in Latin: the native (Paleo-Sardinian) and non-native (Punic) pre-Roman languages were then already extinct (the last Punic inscription in Bithia, southern Sardinia, is from the second or third century AD). Some engraved poems in ancient Greek and Latin (the two most prestigious languages in the Roman Empire) are to be seen in Viper Cave, Cagliari, ("Gruta 'e sa Pibera" in Sardinian, "Grotta della Vipera" in Italian, "Cripta Serpentum" in Latin), a burial monument built by Lucius Cassius Philippus (a Roman who had been exiled to Sardinia) in remembrance of his dead spouse Atilia Pomptilla. We also have some religious works by Saint Lucifer and Eusebius, both from Caralis (Cagliari).
Although Sardinia was culturally influenced and politically ruled by the Byzantine Empire for almost five centuries, Greek did not enter the language except for some ritual or formal expressions in Sardinian using Greek structure and, sometimes, the Greek alphabet. 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. 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 conquered southern Italy and Sicily, communications broke down between Constantinople and Sardinia, whose districts became progressively more autonomous from the Byzantine oecumene (Greek: οἰκουμένη). Sardinia was then brought back into the Latin cultural sphere.
Judicates period.
Sardinian was the first Romance language of all to gain official status, being used by the four Judicates, former Byzantine districts that became independent political entities after the Arab expansion in the Mediterranean cut off any ties left between the island and Byzantium. One of the oldest documents left in Sardinian (the so-called "Carta Volgare") comes from the Judicate of Cagliari and was issued by Torchitorio I de Lacon-Gunale in around 1070, employing the Greek alphabet. Old Sardinian had a greater number of archaisms and Latinisms than the present language does. While the earlier documents show the existence of an early Sardinian Koine, the language used by the various Judicates already displayed a certain range of dialectal variation. 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 remained in force until 1827. It is presumed the Arborean judges attempted to unify the Sardinian dialects to be legitimate rulers of the entire island under a single state ( "Sardinian Republic");
 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").
Dante Alighieri wrote in his 1302–05 essay "De vulgari eloquentia" that Sardinians, not being Italians () and having no of their own, resorted to aping Latin instead. Dante's view has been dismissed, as Sardinian had been following its own course in a way which was already unintelligible to non-islanders. In the popular 12th-century verse from Raimbaut de Vaqueiras' poem "Domna, tant vos ai preiada", Sardinian epitomizes outlandish speech along with German and Berber, having the troubadour's wife say «"No t'entend plui d'un Todesco / Sardesco o Barbarì"» ("I don't understand you any more than [I could] a German / Sard 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"). 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 «Sardinia is large, mountainous, poorly provided with water, two hundred and eighty miles long and one hundred and eighty long from west to east. [...] 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». Indeed, Sardinian was perceived as rather similar to the Latin dialects once spoken by the Christian Berbers in North Africa, giving credit to the theory that vulgar Latin in both Africa and Sardinia displayed a significant wealth of parallelisms. J. N. Adams is of the opinion that similarities in certain words, such as "acina" (grape), "pala" (shoulderblade), or also "spanus" in African Latin and the Sardinian "spanu" ("light red"), could prove that there was a fair amount of vocabulary shared between Sardinia and Africa.
The literature of this period primarily consists of legal documents, besides the aforementioned Carta de Logu. The first document containing Sardinian elements is a 1063 donation to the abbey of Montecassino signed by Barisone I of Torres. 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", called , was published anonymously in the 13th century, relating the events of the Judicate of Torres.
Iberian period – Catalan and Spanish 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. 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 , 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 variations), 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; Alghero is still a Catalan-speaking enclave on Sardinia to this day. 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 began to settle in the northern Sardinian coast, leading to the birth of the Tuscan-sounding Sassarese and Gallurese lects.
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. 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 Spanish, French and Italian poets had already done for their own languages ( and ). Antonio Lo Frasso, a poet born in Alghero (a city he remembered fondly) who spent his life in Barcelona, wrote lyric poetry in Sardinian:
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. 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. 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. 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".
A 1620 proclamation is in the Bosa archives.
Ioan Matheu Garipa, a priest from Orgosolo who translated the Italian into Sardinian () in 1627, was the first author to call Sardinian the closest living relative of classical Latin and, like Araolla before him, valued Sardinian as the language of a specific ethno-national community.
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. This stance was rooted in three political reasons: in the first place, the Savoyards felt like they did not want to rouse international suspicion and followed to the letter the rules dictated by the Treaty of London, signed on the second of August 1718, whereby they committed themselves to respect the fundamental laws of the newly acquired Kingdom; in the second, they did not want to antagonize the hispanophile locals, especially the elites; in the third, they lingered on hoping they could manage to dispose of the island while still keeping the title of Kings by regaining Sicily. In fact, since imposing Italian would mean to break one of the fundamental laws of the Kingdom 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 same King claimed that he was nevertheless not intentioned to ban either Sardinian or Spanish on two separate occasions, in 1726 and 1728. 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, where Italian had long been the 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. 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.
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. 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. 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, whom they often likened to the Spanish and the ancient peoples of the Orient.
However, the Savoyard government eventually decided to directly impose Italian altogether on Sardinia on 25 July 1760, 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, and especially Piedmont. In 1764, the order was extended to all sectors of public life. Spanish was thus replaced as the official language (even though it continued to be used in the parish registers and official deeds until 1828) 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.
The first systematic study on the Sardinian language was written in 1782 by the philologist Matteo Madau, with the title of . 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; 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 , 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. 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 ) 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. 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, attempted in reality to establish a unified Sardinian orthography based on Logudorese, just like Florentine had become the basis for Italian.
The jurist claimed that the suppression of Sardinian and the imposition of Italian was desirable to make the islanders "civilized Italians". 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, 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, 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. 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?"). 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. 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», 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». 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.
During the mobilization for World War I, the Italian Army compelled all Sardinians 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.
Eventually, under Fascism, Sardinia was made 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, including Sardinia's mask festivals and improvised poetry competitions, and a large number of Sardinian surnames were changed to sound more Italian. Following an argument between the Sardinian poet Antioco Casula (also known as "Montanaru") and the fascist journalist Gino Anchisi, who stated that «once the region is moribund or dead, so will the dialect "(sic)"», the latter managed to have Sardinian banned from the printing press, as well. It is by Montanaru that, for the first time in the 20th century, the significance of the Sardinian language was tied to the practices of cultural resistance of an indigenous ethnic group, whose linguistic repertoire had to be introduced in school to regain a dignity perceived to have been lost. 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. 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. On a whole, this period saw the most aggressive cultural assimilation effort by the central government, which led to an even further sociolinguistic degradation of Sardinian. However, the Sardinian Anthem of the once Piedmontese Kingdom was a chance to use a regional language without penalty: as a royal tradition, it could not be forbidden.
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 Teresa to let her son acquire Sardinian with no restriction, because doing otherwise would result in "putting his imagination in a straitjacket" as well as him ending up eventually "learning two jargons, and no language at all".
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 much later than in other European peripheries marked by the long-standing presence of ethno-linguistic minorities; Sardinian was in fact dismissed by the already Italianized 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 modernist stance on Sardinia's path to 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. Consequently, the Sardinians have been encouraged to Italianize and thus part with what they believed to be negatively marking their affiliation with a stigmatized identity.
At the time of drafting of the statute in 1948, the legislator eventually decided to specify the "Sardinian specialty" as a single criterion for political autonomy just on the grounds of a couple of socio-economic issues devoid of considerations of a distinct cultural, historical and geographical identity, which were on the contrary looked down upon as a potential prelude to more autonomist or separatist claims; this attitude would be exemplified by a report of the Italian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into Banditry, which warned against the 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 did not recognize any special geographical conditions about the region nor made any mention of a distinct cultural and linguistic element, preferring instead to concentrate on state-funded plans (baptised with the Italian name of ) for the heavy industrial development of the island, as well as the military installations. Therefore, far from being a Statute grounded on the acknowledgment of a particular cultural identity like, for example, in South Tyrol, what emerged in Sardinia was an «autonomism 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 on the terms of social backwardness and economic deprivation». In the meantime, the emphasis on Italian-only assimilation policies continued, with historical sites and ordinary objects renamed in Italian (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. The rejection of the indigenous language, along with a rigid model of Italian-language education, corporal punishment and shaming, has led to poor schooling for the Sardinians. Early school leaving and school failure rates in Sardinia prompted a debate on the actual efficacy of strictly monolingual education in the Nineties, with new proposals for 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. To such endeavor was oriented the activism of intellectuals like Antonio Simon Mossa, who had drawn from his past experiences across the world that Sardinians too were facing the danger of cultural assimilation, and whose fervor reverberated across the Sardinian society and pushed 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 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. 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. 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" ("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.
It was in the late 70s that a significant shift to Italian was first 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 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). Such consensus remains relatively stable to this day; 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. 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. 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.
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"). 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.
Still, some national school books (education does not fall under the remits of the region 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; 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.
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 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"), 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") 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; some linguists, like Mauro Maxia, cite the low number of Sardinian-speaking children 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.
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, 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 groups), justice, administrative authorities and public services, media, and cultural, ecclesiastical, economic and social activities, as well as facilities.
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.
In 2015, the Council of Europe commented on the status of national minorities in Italy, noting the "à la carte" approach of the Italian state 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. 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, are largely insufficient to meet "even the most basic expectations".
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, the late recognition as a minority language, as well as the gradual but pervasive Italianization promoted by the 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, most of the younger generation of islanders, although they do understand some basic Sardinian, is now in fact Italian monolingual and monocultural, being able to speak not Sardinian anymore, but a Sardinian-influenced variety of Italian which in its lowest diastratic forms 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. Even many Sardinian speakers, who have been increasingly raised in Italian, have now just a limited active or solely passive command of their ethnic language. 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.
In conclusion, the Sardinian language, while still viable overall, continues to be adversely affected by pervasive and all-encompassing Italianization, and thus continues its agony, albeit 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". 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. 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.
Phonology.
All dialects of Sardinian have phonetic features that are relatively conservative compared to other Romance languages. The degree of conservatism varies, with the dialect spoken in the Province of Nuoro displaying some of the most conservative features. Medieval evidence indicates that the language spoken in Sardinia and Corsica at the time was similar to modern Nuorese Sardinian; while Corsica underwent a process of Tuscanization that rendered the Corsican dialects akin to Tuscan, the Sardinian dialects are thought to have slowly evolved through some Catalan, Spanish and later Italian influences.
The examples listed below are from the Logudorese dialect:
Sardinian contains the following phonetic innovations:
Vowels.
Vowels are , , , and , without length differentiation, with allophonic lengthening in open stressed syllables when followed by a voiced consonant:
A strict metaphony occurs when a high vowel , , or a palatal consonant, occur in a post-stressed syllable. It results in the raising of and to and , not only in the primary-stressed syllable, but throughout the word: Log. [ˈlɛpːɛrɛ] 'hare' > [lepːeˈreɖːu] 'hare (diminutive)', [miˈnɔːrɛ] 'small' > [minoˈreɖːu] 'tiny'. The same process continues to operate in the dialects of south-eastern Salento, which can be taken as evidence that this was the original type of metaphony in Romance, with diphthongisation a secondary development.
All Campidanese varieties are characterized by the raising of word-final and to and , which spread from Cagliari towards the middle of the island from the 11th century and is commonly attributed to Byzantine influence. This finds a parallel in the Sicilian vowel system, where all the close-mid vowels have been raised and merged with high vowels.
There are also nasal vowels , , , , , , in some Campidanese varieties, which arise when an intervocalic "n" is deleted with nasalization of both the surrounding vowels: "well".
All varieties show paragogic vowels: the vowel of the final syllable ending in a consonant is copied after it to form a new open syllable, which undergoes the usual lenition (voicing) processes: Log. / Camp. ‘strangers’. This is only present before pause, and may be variable with some speakers.
Logudorese and Nuorese display vowel insertion before initial /sC/ clusters, less typical of Campidanese (examples above); the latter displays it before word-initial /r/: Camp. , Log. < "reddish".
Consonants.
Sardinian has the following consonants:
Plosives.
The Sardinian system of plosives cannot be exhaustively characterized by either qualitative (voicing) or quantitative (duration) contrasts, but both contrasts must be specified independently on some level of grammar. All plosives participate in a system-wide and complex process of lenition that characterizes all varieties of Sardinian and operates across word boundaries.
There are three series of plosives or corresponding approximants:
Processes.
Neutralizations.
Most varieties are characterised by the historic neutralization of Latin /l/ and /r/ into the archiphoneme /R/ within the morpheme: 'rock'. The Campidanese dialect does not generally allow this /R/ to end syllables except if followed by another /R/; as a result, underlying /R.C/ sequences are synchronically and systematically repaired, either through assimilation or metathesis:
Sandhi.
Only /s/, /n/, /r/, /t/ are permitted word-ﬁnally. The first three of these alternate in notable external sandhi processes. For Nuorese, /s/ and /r/ neutralise (merge) when in sandhi in the following way:
The word-final /t/ is assimilated to the following consonant within a phrase, or can be said to disappear, inducing strengthening: Log. ['kɛrɛ b'bɛnnɛrɛ] '(s)he wants to come'.
Morphosyntactic gemination.
Unlike Tuscan Italian, Neapolitan and Sicilian, Sardinian doesn't have a productive process of syntactic gemination since most Latin final consonants have been maintained. Nevertheless, there are a few lexical items that formerly ended in consonants, and thus prevented initial-consonant weakening (lenition); as a result, consonants occurring after these words undergo strengthening, typically by gemination. These include the conjunction "and" < La. , the preposition "to, at" < La. as well as the interrogative particle < La. .
Grammar.
Some distinctive features typical of Sardinian are:
Varieties.
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, 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 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. 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 the 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"), the front middle vowels (compare Campidanese iotacism, probably from Byzantine Greek) 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"). "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 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).
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. The afore-mentioned 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, although some Sardinian is also understood by the majority of people living there (73.6% in Gallura and 67.8% in the Sassarese-speaking subregion). Sassari, the second-largest city on Sardinia and the main center of the northern half of the island ("cabu de susu" in Sardinian, "capo di sopra" in Italian), is located there. 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).
Standardization.
Until 2001 there was not a single orthographic standard available that was representative of all the dialects of Sardinian, neither for writing it nor to speak it (the latter does not exist even today); previous attempts in this direction had been hindered by the Iberian and later Savoyard authorities. Since the 18th century, not because of linguistic reasons but for political ones, the Sardinian language has been presented as having two standardized orthographies, conventionally named "Logudorese" and "Campidanese". However, some attempts have been made to introduce a single orthographic form for administrative purposes over the recent decades; said form would not refer to morphology and syntax, which is already fairly homogeneous, but would rather concern 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 "imposed" and "artificial" language based on the mediation between the central-northern varieties.
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 a reference basis, 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 leaving the possibility of representing the phonetic peculiarities of the local variants. Despite this, there were some criticism or proposals for amendments for this norm as well.
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 followed the LSC standard in the translation of many documents and resolutions and in many other areas. In addition, the LSC standard has been used as a voluntary choice by many other institutions, schools and media, often in a complementary manner with orthographic norms closer to the local pronunciation. 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 from that research 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.