Сардиния тілі: тарихы мен қазіргі жағдайы

Romance language indigenous to the island of Sardinia
the modern Romance language

Sardinian or Sard (, , 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, together with Italian, as the language that is the closest to Latin among all Latin's descendants. However, it has also incorporated elements of Pre Latin (mostly Paleo Sardinian and, to a much lesser degree, Punic) substratum, as well as a Byzantine Greek, Catalan, Castilian, 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, when Sardinian was officially employed in accordance with documentary testimonies, it came during the late Middle Ages into the Iberian sphere of influence, during which Catalan and Castilian became the island's prestige languages and would remain so well into the 18th century. Finally, from the early 18th century onward, under the Savoyard and contemporary Italian one, following the country's linguistic policies which, to the detriment of Sardinian and the local Catalan, 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. 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. usually 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 Euromosaic report, in which Sardinian "is in 43rd place in the ranking of the 50 languages taken into consideration and of which were analysed (a) use in the family, (b) cultural reproduction, (c) use in the community, (d) prestige, (e) use in institutions, (f) use in education". As the Sardinians have almost been completely assimilated into the Italian national mores, including in terms of onomastics, and therefore now only happen to keep but a scant and fragmentary knowledge of their native and once first spoken language, limited in both scope and frequency of use, Sardinian has been classified by UNESCO as "definitely endangered". In fact, the intergenerational chain of transmission appears to have been broken since at least the 1960s, in such a way that the younger generations, who are predominantly Italian monolinguals, do not identify themselves with the indigenous tongue, which is now reduced to the memory of "little more than the language of their grandparents". As the long to even medium term future of the Sardinian language looks far from secure in the present circumstances, Martin Harris concluded in 2003 that, assuming the continuation of present trends to language death, it was possible that there would not be a Sardinian language of which to speak in the future, being referred to by linguists as the mere substratum of the now prevailing idiom, i. e. Italian articulated in its own Sardinian influenced variety, which may come to wholly supplant the islanders' once living native tongue.

Now the question arises as to whether Sardinian is to be considered a dialect or a language. Politically speaking, of course, it is one of the many dialects of Italy, just like the Serbo Croatian and the Albanian that are spoken in various Calabrian and Sicilian villages. The question, however, takes on a different nature when considered from a linguistic perspective. Sardinian cannot be said to be closely related to any dialect of mainland Italy; it is an archaic Romance tongue with its own distinctive characteristics, which can be seen in its rather unique vocabulary as well as its morphology and syntax, which differ radically from those of the Italian dialects.|Max Leopold Wagner
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; its substratum (Paleo Sardinian or Nuragic) has also been researched. In the first written testimonies, dating to the eleventh century, Sardinian appears as a language already distinct from the dialects of Italy. 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. 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 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. 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 ((b)ía de sa báza, (b)ía de sa bálla, "the Way of Straw") also recurs in the Berber languages. To most Italians Sardinian is unintelligible, reminding them of Spanish, because of the way in which the language is acoustically articulated; characterized as it is by a sharply outlined physiognomy which is displayed from the earliest sources available, it is in fact considered a distinct language, if not an altogether different branch, among the Romance idioms; George Bossong summarises thus: "be this as it may, from a strictly linguistic point of view there can be no doubt that Sardinian is to be classified as an independent Romance language, or even as an independent branch inside the family, and so it is classed alongside the great national languages like French and Italian in all modern manuals of Romance linguistics".

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 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.

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. The Savoyard representative, the Count of Lucerna di Campiglione, received the definitive deed of cession from the Austrian delegate Don Giuseppe dei Medici, on condition that the "rights, statutes, privileges of the nation" that had been the subject of diplomatic negotiations were preserved. The island thus entered the Italian orbit after the Iberian one, although this transfer would not initially entail any social nor cultural and linguistic changes: 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. Until 1848, the Kingdom of Sardinia would be a composite state, and the island of Sardinia would remain a separate country with its own traditions and institutions, albeit without summa potestas and in personal union as an overseas possession of the House of Savoy. 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 Joaquín Arce 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 through Piedmont instead. 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 as well as "treating the [Sardinian] followers of one faction and of the other equally, but keeping them divided in such a way as to prevent them from uniting, and for us to put to good use such rivalry when the occasion presents itself". According to Amos Cardia, 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 (insensibilmente), 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. 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 prestige and even official language, can be deduced from the study Memoria dei mezzi che si propongono per introdurre l'uso della lingua italiana in questo Regno ("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 ignotam linguam per notam expōnĕre ("to introduce an unknown language [Italian] through a known one [Spanish]") method as the best course of action for Italianisation. 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. Eduardo Blasco Ferrer argues that, 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, an opinion illustrated by the Duke Francis IV and Antonio Bresciani; a popular assertion by the officer Giulio Bechi, who would participate in a military campaign against Sardinian banditry dubbed as caccia grossa ("great hunt"), was that the islanders spoke "a horrible language, as intricate as Saracen, and sounding like Spanish". However, the Savoyard government eventually decided to directly introduce Italian altogether to Sardinia on the conventional date of 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 orbit of the Italian peninsula, through the thorough assimilation of the island's cultural models, which were deemed by the Savoyard functionaries as "foreign" and "inferior", to Piedmont. In fact, the measure in question prohibited, among other things, "the unreserved use of the Castilian idiom in writing and speaking, which, after forty years of Italian rule, was still so deeply rooted in the hearts of the Sardinian teachers". In 1764, the exclusive imposition of the Italian language was finally extended to all sectors of public life, including education, in parallel with the reorganisation of the Universities of Cagliari and Sassari, which saw the arrival of personnel from the Italian mainland, and the reorganisation of lower education, where it was decided likewise to send teachers from Piedmont to make up for the lack of Italian speaking Sardinian teachers. In 1763, it had already been planned to "send a number of skilled Italian professors" to Sardinia to "rid the Sardinian teachers of their errors" and "steer them along the right path". Spanish was replaced as the official language, even though Italian struggled to take roots for a long time: Milà i Fontanals wrote in 1863 that Catalan had been used in notarial instruments from Sardinia well into the 1780s, The most immediate effect of the order was thus the further marginalization of the Sardinians' native idiom, making way for a thorough Italianisation of the island. The first systematic study on the Sardinian language was written in 1782 by the philologist Matteo Madau, with the title of Il ripulimento della lingua sarda lavorato sopra la sua antologia colle due matrici lingue, la greca e la latina. The intention that motivated Madau was to trace the ideal path through which Sardinian could be elevated to the island's proper national language; nevertheless, according to Amos Cardia, 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 Bonifacio d'Olmi, 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 Prima grammatica de' tre dialetti sardi, 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. As for the reactions that the three year Sardinian revolutionary period aroused in the island's ruling class, who were now in the process of Italianisation, for Sotgiu "its failure was complete: undecided between a breathless municipalism and a dead end attachment to the Crown, it did not have the courage to lead the revolutionary wave coming from the countryside". The only result was therefore "the defeat of the peasant class emerging from the very core of feudal society, urged on by the masses of peasants and led by the most advanced forces of the Sardinian bourgeoisie"

In the climate of monarchic restoration that followed Giovanni Maria Angioy's rebellion, whose substantial failure marked therefrom a historic watershed in Sardinia's future, 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 Falsi d'Arborea by the unionist 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 del dialetto sardo meridionale) 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 Carlo Baudi di Vesme claimed that the suppression of Sardinian and the imposition of Italian was desirable to make the islanders into "civilized Italians". Since Sardinia was, in the words of Di Vesme, "not Spanish, but neither Italian: it is and has been for centuries just Sardinian", it was necessary, at the turn of the circumstances that "inflamed it with ambition, desire and love of all things Italian", to spread the Italian language in Sardinia "presently so little known in the interior"

The primary and tertiary education was thus offered exclusively through Italian, and Piedmontese cartographers went on to replace many Sardinian place names with Italian ones. 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 Sos discursos sacros in limba sarda ("Holy Discourses in Sardinian language"), wherein the author lamented the fact that Sardinia, "hoe provinzia italiana non podet tenner sas lezzes e sos attos pubblicos in sa propia limba" ("Being an Italian province nowadays, [Sardinia] cannot have laws and public acts made in its own language"), and while claiming that "sa limba sarda, totu chi non uffiziale, durat in su Populu Sardu cantu durat sa Sardigna" ("the Sardinian language, however unofficial, will last as long as Sardinia among the Sardinians"), he also asked himself "Proite mai nos hamus a dispreziare cun d'unu totale abbandonu sa limba sarda, antiga et nobile cantu s'italiana, sa franzesa et s'ispagnola?" ("Why should we show neglect and contempt for Sardinian, which is a language as ancient and noble as Italian, French and Spanish?"). 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

Despite the long term assimilation policy, the anthem of the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia would 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. Between 1848 and 1861, the island was plunged into a social and economic crisis that was to last until the post war period. Eventually, Sardinian came to be perceived as sa limba de su famine / sa lingua de su famini, 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 Italian tongue to their children, since they saw it as the portal to escaping from a poverty stricken, rural, isolated and underprivileged life.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Sardinian had remained an object of research almost only among the island's scholars, struggling to garner international interest and even more suffering from a certain marginalization in the strictly Italian sphere: one observes in fact "the prevalence of foreign scholars over Italian ones and/or the existence of fundamental and still irreplaceable contributions by non Italian linguists". Previously, Sardinian had been mentioned in a book by August Fuchs on irregular verbs in Romance languages (Über die sogennannten unregelmässigen Zeitwörter in den romanischen Sprachen, Berlin, 1840) and, later, in the second edition of Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen (1856–1860) written by Friedrich Christian Diez, credited as one of the founders of Romance philology. Wilhelm Meyer Lübke, an undisputed authority on Romance linguistics, published in 1902 an essay on Logudorese Sardinian from the survey of the condaghe of San Pietro di Silki (Zur Kenntnis des Altlogudoresischen, in Sitzungsberichte der kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaft Wien, Phil. Hist. Kl., 145), the study of which led to the initiation into Sardinian linguistics of the then university student Max Leopold Wagner: it is to the latter's activity that much of the twentieth century knowledge and research of Sardinian in the phonetic, morphological and, in part, syntactic fields was generated.) 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"), which would be written in 1994 by Luciano Sechi; its title derives from the German language Rote Teufel ("red devils"), by which they were popularly known among the troops of the Austro Hungarian Army. Compulsory military service around this period played a role in language shift and is referred to by historian Manlio Brigaglia as "the first great mass "nationalization"" of the Sardinians. Nevertheless, similarly to Navajo speaking service members in the United States during World War II, as well as Quechua speakers during the Falklands War, native Sardinians were offered the opportunity to be recruited as code talkers to transmit tactical information in Sardinian over radio communications which might have otherwise run the risk of being gained by Austrian troops, since some of them hailed from Italian speaking areas to which, therefore, the Sardinian language was utterly alien: Alfredo Graziani writes in his war diary that "having learned that many of our phonograms were being intercepted, we adopted the system of communicating on the phone only in Sardinian, certain that in this way they would never be able to understand what one was saying". To avoid infiltration attempts by said Italophone troops, positions were guarded by Sardinian recruits from the Sassari Brigade who required anyone who came to them that they identify themselves first by proving they spoke Sardinian: "si ses italianu, faedda in sardu!". Coinciding with the year of the Irish War of Independence, Sardinian autonomism re emerged as an expression of the fighters' movement, coagulating into the Sardinian Action Party (PsdAz) which, before long, would become one of the most important players in the island's political life. At the beginning, the party would not have had strictly ethnic claims though, being the Sardinian language and culture widely perceived, in the words of Fiorenzo Toso, as "symbols of the region's underdevelopment". Local cultural expressions were thus repressed, including Sardinia's festivals and improvised poetry competitions, 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, "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 subversive 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. 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. While the interior managed to at least partially resist this intrusion at first, everywhere else the regime had succeeded in thoroughly supplanting the local cultural models with new ones hitherto foreign to the community and compress the former into a "pure 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". This period is identified by Manlio Brigaglia as the second mass "nationalization" of the Sardinians, which was characterized by "a policy deliberately aiming at "Italianisation"" by means of, in his words, "a declared war" against the usage of the Sardinian language by fascism and the Catholic Church alike. Sardinian was in fact dismissed by the middle class, As the language bore an increasing amount of stigmatisation and came to be perceived as an undesirable identity marker, the Sardinians were consequently encouraged to part with it by way of linguistic and cultural assimilation. 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, 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 piani di rinascita) 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". 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, The Ministry of Public Education once requested that the teachers willing to teach Sardinian be put under surveillance. 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, has led to poor schooling for the Sardinians. Roberto Bolognesi stated that in his school years in Sardinia, he had "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". 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, that Sardinians were one of the many ethnic and national minorities facing the danger of cultural assimilation, 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. 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. 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 (Remundu) Piras some months before his death in 1977, urging bilingual education to reverse the ongoing trend of cultural De Sardization. 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. 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. 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; 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 (cantu a tenore, cantu a chiterra, gosos etc.) to rock (Kenze Neke, Askra, Tzoku, Tazenda etc.) and even hip hop and rap (Dr. Drer e CRC Posse, Quilo, Sa Razza, Malam, Su Akru, 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 (Sa chistione mundiali de s'Energhia), 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,). 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, 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 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;) and 8a ("Moribund: the only remaining active speakers of the language are members of the grandparent generation" 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++, QGIS, Swiftkey, Stellarium, Skype, VLC media player for Android and iOS, Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 "Betsy", Firefox 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, 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 Italianisation 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. 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 as they are not able to speak Sardinian anymore, but simply regional Italian (known amongst Italian linguists as italiano regionale sardo or IrS) which in its lowest diastratic forms is, oftentimes derisively, nicknamed italiànu porcheddìnu (literally "swinish Italian") by native Sardinian speakers. Roberto Bolognesi argues that, in the face of the persistent denial and rejection of the Sardinian language, it is as if the latter "had taken revenge" on its original community of speakers "and continues to do so by "polluting" the hegemonic linguistic system", recalling Gramsci's prophetic warning uttered at the dawn of the previous century. "the (little) Sardinian which is used by young people often constitutes an ungrammatical jargon filled with obscenities and constructions belonging to Italian":

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 being described as "viable" in 2003, continues to be adversely affected by pervasive and all encompassing Italianisation 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". 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 Italianisation; 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.

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. However, Sardinian may also change the final vowel. 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.

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: 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.

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. 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. 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, 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%).

From the Sardinian language stem both the historical Sardinian given names, which the natives used to confer on each other until contemporary times, as well as most of the traditional surnames still common on the island. Sardinian place names have a very ancient history and, in some cases, have originated a significant debate about their origins.