Sardinian language
Sardinian or Sard is a Romance language spoken by the Sardinians on the Western Mediterranean island of Sardinia.
Many Romance linguists consider it the language that is closest to Latin, among all the genealogical descendants of Latin. However, it has also incorporated elements of a Pre-Latin 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.
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 minoranze linguistiche storiche were similarly recognized by national law. Among these, Sardinian is notable as having the largest number of speakers.
However, the number of native speakers has been 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 beyond 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 has also been researched. A 1949 study by the Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree of difference from a language's parent by comparing phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation, indicated the following percentages : 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" 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. The language is posited to have substratal influences from Paleo-Sardinian, which some scholars have linked to Basque and Etruscan. Adstratal influences include Catalan, Spanish, and Italian. The situation of Sardinian language with regard to the politically dominant ones did not change until fascism and, most evidently, the 1950s.Origins of modern Sardinian
;Prenuragic and Nuragic eraThe origins of ancient Sardinian, also known as Paleo-Sardinian, are currently unknown. Research has attempted to discover obscure, indigenous, pre-Romance roots. The root srd, 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 srd from Σαρδώ, a legendary woman from the Anatolian Kingdom of Lydia, or from the Libyan mythological figure of the Sardus Pater Babai.
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. 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 are descended from Lydian 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. Rohlfs, Butler and Craddock add the suffix -' as a unique element of Paleo-Sardinian. Suffixes in /a, e, o, u/ + -rr- found a correspondence in north Africa, in Iberia and in southern Italy and Gascony, with a closer relationship to Basque. 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 :wikt:desinence|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/ have also been noted as Paleo-Sardinian elements.
Linguists Blasco Ferrer and Arregi have attempted to revive a theoretical connection with Basque by linking words such as Sardinian ospile "fresh grazing for cattle" and Basque ozpil; Sardinian arrotzeri "vagabond" and Basque arrotz "stranger"; Sardinian golostiu and Basque gorosti “holly”; Gallurese zerru “pig” and Basque zerri. 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 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 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.
;Classical period
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", guspinu "nasturtium", curma "fringed rue", mítza "source", síntziri "marsh horsetail", tzeúrra "sprout", tzichirìa "dill" and tzípiri "rosemary" are commonly used, especially in the modern Sardinian varieties of the Campidanese plain, while proceeding northwards the influence is more limited to place names, like Macumadas in the Province of Nuoro or Magumadas in Gesico and Nureci, which derive from the Punic maqom hadash "new city".
The Roman domination began in 238 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 as attested by votive inscriptions. Some obscure Nuragic roots remained unchanged, and in many cases Latin accepted the local roots. Barbagia, the mountainous central region of the island, derives its name from the Latin Barbaria, 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 to emphasize Roman superiority.
During the long Roman domination Latin gradually become however the speech of the majority of the island's inhabitants. As a result of this 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.
At that time, the only literature being produced in Sardinia was mostly in Latin: the native and non-native pre-Roman languages were then already extinct. Some engraved poems in ancient Greek and Latin are to be seen in Viper Cave, Cagliari,, a burial monument built by Lucius Cassius Philippus in remembrance of his dead spouse Atilia Pomptilla. We also have some religious works by Saint Lucifer and Eusebius, both from Caralis.
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, together with the personal names Mikhaleis, Konstantine and Basilis, demonstrate Greek influence.
of Saint Peter of Silki, written in Sardinian.
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. 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 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" 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 in order to be legitimate rulers of the entire island under a single state ;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 "Baresonus Dei Gratia Rei Sardiniee and Est vis Sardorum pariter regnum Populorum.
| Extract from the Logudorese Privilege |
| « In nomine Domini amen. Ego iudice Mariano de Lacon fazo ista carta ad onore de omnes homines de Pisas pro xu toloneu ci mi pecterunt: e ego donolislu pro ca lis so ego amicu caru e itsos a mimi; ci nullu imperatore ci lu aet potestare istu locu de non apat comiatu de leuarelis toloneu in placitu: de non occidere pisanu ingratis: e ccausa ipsoro ci lis aem leuare ingratis, de facerlis iustitia inperatore ci nce aet exere intu locu » |
Dante Alighieri wrote in his 1302–05 essay De vulgari eloquentia that Sardinians, not being Italians and having no lingua vulgaris 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 ; the Tuscan poet Fazio degli Uberti refers to the Sardinians in his poem Dittamondo as una gente che niuno non la intende / né essi sanno quel ch'altri pispiglia. The Muslim geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who lived in Palermo, Sicily at the court of King Roger II, wrote in his work Kitab Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi'khtirāq al-āfāq 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 Rūm Afāriqah, like the Berbers; they shun contacts with all the other Rūm 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.
from the 13th–14th centuries
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 in Campidanese, the 1080 Logudorese Privilege, the 1089 Donation of Torchitorio, the 1190–1206 Marsellaise Chart and an 1173 communication between the Bishop Bernardo of Civita and Benedetto, who oversaw the Opera del Duomo in Pisa. The Statutes of Sassari and Castelgenovese are written in Logudorese.
The first chronicle in lingua sive ydiomate sardo, called Condagues de Sardina, 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 a Aragonese victory at Sanluri in 1409 and the renunciation of any succession right signed by William III 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. Agreeing with Fara's De rebus Sardois, the Sardinian attorney Sigismondo Arquer, author of Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia Universalis, 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.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.
Extract from sa Vitta et sa Morte, et Passione de sanctu Gavinu, Prothu et Januariu |
| O Deus eternu, sempre omnipotente, In s’aiudu meu ti piacat attender, Et dami gratia de poder acabare Su sanctu martiriu, in rima vulgare, 5. De sos sanctos martires tantu gloriosos Et cavaleris de Cristus victoriosos, Sanctu Gavinu, Prothu e Januariu, Contra su demoniu, nostru adversariu, Fortes defensores et bonos advocados, 10. Qui in su Paradisu sunt glorificados De sa corona de sanctu martiriu. Cussos sempre siant in nostru adiutoriu. Amen. |
Despite Catalan being widely spoken and written on the island at this time, 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 Sa Vitta et sa Morte, et Passione de sanctu Gavinu, Brothu et Ianuariu, written by Antòni Canu and published in 1557.
The 16th century is instead marked by a new Sardinian literary revival: Rimas Spirituales, by Hieronimu Araolla, was aimed at "glorifying and enriching Sardinian, our language" as Spanish, French and Italian poets had already done for their languages. Antonio Lo Frasso, a poet born in Alghero who spent his life in Barcelona, wrote lyric poetry in Sardinian:
... Non podende sufrire su tormentu / de su fogu ardente innamorosu. / Videndemi foras de sentimentu / et sensa una hora de riposu, / pensende istare liberu e contentu / m'agato pius aflitu e congoixosu, / in essermi de te senora apartadu, / mudende ateru quelu, ateru istadu ....
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. A notable exception was Pedro Delitala, 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.
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 Leggendario delle Sante Vergini e Martiri di Gesù Cristo 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.
, wherein a total of thirty-nine gravestones have writings in Sardinian and three in Italian.
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. Such prudence was noted, when the King himself claimed that he was intentioned to ban neither Sardinian nor 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 Memoria dei mezzi che si propongono per introdurre l'uso della lingua italiana in questo Regno commissioned in 1726 by the Piedmontese administration, to which the Jesuit Antonio Falletti from Barolo responded suggesting the ignotam linguam per notam expōnĕre method as the best course of action for Italianization.However, the Savoyard government eventually decided to directly impose Italian on Sardinia on July 25, 1760, because of the Savoyards' geopolitical need to draw the island away from the Spanish influence and culturally align Sardinia with the Italian peninsula, and especially Piedmont. In 1764, the order was extended to all sectors of public life. Spanish was thus replaced as the official language 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 printzipales, 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 Su patriottu sardu a sos feudatarios, 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 Il ripulimento della lingua sarda lavorato sopra la sua antologia colle due matrici lingue, la greca e la latina. 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 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 <
in 1856.|alt=
In contrast to the Mainland's cultural dynamics established between Italian and the various Romance dialects, 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 between two very different languages, and not between a language and one of its dialects. The plurisecular Iberian period also contributed in making the Sardinians feel relatively detached from the Italian language and its cultural sphere, and the Spanish themselves, comprising both the Aragonese and Castilian ruling class, had already considered Sardinian a distinct language with respect to their own ones and Italian as well.
The jurist :it:Carlo Baudi di Vesme|Carlo Baudi di Vesme claimed that the suppression of Sardinian and the imposition of Italian was desirable in order 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 Sos discursos sacros in limba sarda, wherein the author lamented over the fact that Sardinia, "hoe provinzia italiana non podet tenner sas lezzes e sos attos pubblicos in sa propia limba", and while claiming that "sa limba sarda, totu chi non uffiziale, durat in su Populu Sardu cantu durat sa Sardigna", 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?". 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", 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, 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, also known as Cunservet Deus su Re, 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.
, daily newspaper in Italian language founded in 1889.
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. It is currently the only unit in Italy with an anthem in a language other than Italian: Dimonios, written in 1994 by Luciano Sechi. Its title derives from Rote Teufel''. 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 and the fascist journalist Gino Anchisi, who stated that <
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.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, that were on the contrary looked down upon as a potential prelude to more autonomist or separatist claims. 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 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. The Ministry of Public Education reportedly 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, led to poor schooling for Sardinians.
There have been campaigns, often expressed in the form of political demands from the late '60s onwards, to give Sardinian equal status with Italian as a means to promote cultural identity. One of the first demands 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 ethno-linguistic minority and Sardinian as the island's co-official language. Critical acclaim in Sardinian cultural circles followed the patriotic poem No sias isciau by Raimondo Piras some months before his death in 1977, urging bilingual education to reverse the ongoing trend of de-sardization. It was in the late 70s that a significant shift to Italian was first noted not only in the Campidanian plains, 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.
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 presented to the Regional Council in the '80s. A survey conducted by MAKNO in 1984 showed that three-fourth of the Sardinians had a positive attitude towards bilingual education and official bilingualism like in the Aosta Valley and South Tyrol. 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.
In the 1990s, there had been a resurgence of Sardinian-language music, ranging from the more traditional genres to rock and even hip hop and rap, 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 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.
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; it was not until 1997 that Sardinian was finally recognized by the regional law without there being any recourse from the Italian central government. Eventually, sustained activism made possible the formal recognition of twelve minority languages in the late 1990s by the framework , following Art. 6 of the Italian Constitution. While the first section of said law states that Italian is the official language of the Republic, a number of provisions are included in order to normalize the use of such languages and let them become part of the national fabric. However, Italy has signed but never ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Furthermore, many people in Italy outside of Sardinia continue to regard Sardinian as an "Italian dialect", likewise some national school books have not stopped to squeeze the language into the Italian acceptation of dialetto italiano. 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.
in Siniscola
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, on the way to become "severely endangered"
Language use is far from stable; following the Expanded GIDS model, Sardinian would position between 7 and 8a. While an estimated 68 percent of the islanders had in fact a good oral command of Sardinian, language ability among the children 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". According to the data published by ISTAT in 2006, 52.5% of the population in Sardinia speaks just Italian in the family environment, while 29.3% alternates Italian and Sardinian and only 16.6% uses Sardinian or other non-Italian languages; outside the social circle of family and friends, the numbers define Italian as the prevalent language, while the usage of Sardinian and other languages drops to 5,2%. 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 and the "linguistic minorities" whose language is not spoken in any state other than Italy. 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 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.
, Lord's Prayer plaque in Sardinian
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 couple of other apps, like F-Droid, Diaspora, OsmAnd, Notepad++, Swiftkey, Stellarium, Skype, VLC media player for Android, Linux Mint Debina 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 had reached an agreement involving a series of amendments to the old 1997 law in order 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 had been eventually approved on June 27, 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 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. 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, Spain, Iceland and Czech Republic. Shigeaki Sugeta also taught Sardinian to his students of Romance languages at the Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.
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, politics, 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 has been introduced for the first time in Sardinia and Italy at the University of Cagliari, although such a course was 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 Euromosaic project, which has 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:
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 is often nicknamed italiànu porcheddìnu by native Sardinian speakers.
Whatever the fate of the Sardinian language might be, it shall therefore constitute the substratum of the one prevailing now, Italian, in a number of linguistic components specific to the island.
Phonology
All dialects of Sardinian have phonetic features that are relatively archaic compared to other Romance languages. The degree of archaism varies, with the dialect spoken in the Province of Nuoro being considered the most conservative. 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:
- Latin vowels lost length contrast, but have all preserved their original sound; in particular, short and, which did not change in Sardinian, became instead and, respectively, in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, where Latin contrastive length resulted in contrastive quality.
- Preservation of the plosive sounds and before front vowels and in many words; for example, centum > chentu "hundred"; decem > dèche "ten" and gener > ghèneru "son-in-law".
- Absence of diphthongizations found in other Romance languages; for example, potest > podest "he can" ; bonus > bónu "good".
- Change of the Latin -ll- into a retroflex, shared with Sicilian and Southern Corsican; for example, corallus > coraddu "coral" and villa > bidda "village, town".
- Similar changes in the consonant clusters -ld- and -nd-: solidus > "money", abundantia > "abundance".
- Evolution of -pl-, -fl- and -cl- into -pr-, -fr- and -cr-, as in Portuguese and Galician; for example, platea > pratza "public square", fluxus > frúsciu "flabby" and ecclesia > cresia "church".
- Metathesis as in abbratzare > abbaltzare "to hug, to embrace". In word-initial position, it can produce marked syllable onsets such as , , , , e.g. ianuarius > jrennazu "January".
- Vowel prothesis before an initial r in Campidanese, similar to Basque and Gascon: rēx > urrèi/re "king" ; rota > arroda "wheel" ; rīvus > Sardinian and Gascon arríu "river".
- Vowel prothesis in Logudorese before an initial s followed by consonant, as in the Western Romance languages: scrīptum > iscrítu "written", stēlla > isteddu "star"
- Except for the Nuorese dialect, Latin single voiceless plosives,, became voiced approximant consonants. Single voiced plosives,, were lost: caritātem > caridàde /, locus > lógu /. This also applies across word boundaries: porcu "pig", but su borcu "the pig"; tempus "time", but su tempus "the time"; domu "house", but sa ’omu "the house". Such sound changes have become grammaticalised, making Sardinian an initial mutating language with similarities in this to the Insular Celtic languages.
Vowels
Vowels are,,, and, without length differentiation. Metaphony occurs with and, which in particular tend to be open-mid and when they are stressed and the following syllable does not contain or or a palatal.| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | |||
| Close-mid | |||
| Open |
Some varieties of Sardinian have vowel phonemes separate from /e/ and /o/.
There are also nasal vowels,,,, in some varieties, and even nasal diphthongs when an intervocalic n is deleted like in beni.
Consonants
Sardinian has the following consonants:| Bilabial | Labio- dental | Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | |
| Nasal | ||||||||
| Plosive | ||||||||
| Affricate | ||||||||
| Fricative | ||||||||
| Tap | ||||||||
| Trill | ||||||||
| Lateral | ||||||||
| Approximant |
There are three series of plosives or corresponding approximants:
- Voiceless stops derive from their Latin counterparts in composition after another stop. They are reinforced in initial position, but this reinforcement is not written because it does not produce a different phoneme.
- Double voiced stops derive from their Latin equivalents in composition after another stop.
- Weak voiced "stops", sometimes transcribed , derive from single Latin stops.
- and alternate in Campidanese Sardinian but not Nuorese
The double-voiced retroflex stop derives from the former retroflex lateral approximant.
Fricatives
- The labiodentals and.
- * Latin initial v becomes b.
- ** In central Sardinia the sound disappears, akin to the > change in Gascon and Old Spanish.
- , written -th-, is a restricted dialectal variety of the phoneme.
- , from assimilation; for example, ipsa > íssa.
- , pronounced at the beginning of a word, otherwise, is written -sc-; its voiced equivalent,, is often spelled with the letter x.
Affricates
- , a denti-alveolar affricate consonant written -tz-, corresponds to Italian -z- or -ci-.
- , written -z-, corresponds to Italian -gi-- or -ggi-.
- is written -c- or -ç-.
- is written -g- or -j-.
Nasals
- ,
- ,
- , written -gn- or -nny-/-nni-.
Liquids
- is double initially.
In palatal context, Latin l changed into,,, or, rather than the of Italian: achizare, *volia > bòlla/bòlza/bòza "wish, longing", folia > fogia/folla/foza "leaf", fīlia > filla/fidza/fiza "daughter".
Rhotics
- Underlying rhotics become an alveolar fricative before voiceless stops
- Seen in /trɛs/ ‘three’, /battɔr/ 'four'
- Word-final /s/ and /r/ surfaces as a partially voiced and a tap respectively before a vowel
- Word-final /s/ and /r/ neutralizes to when a voiceless obstruent follows
Grammar
- The plural marker is -s, 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.
- The definite article derives from the Latin ipse: su, sa, plural sos, sas and is. 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.
- A periphrastic construction of "have to" is used for the future: ap'a istàre < apo a istàre "I will stay", Vulgar Latin 'habeo ad stare'. All the other Romance languages have realisations of the alternative Vulgar Latin 'stare habeo', Italian "starò", Spanish "estaré", Portuguese "estarei".
- For prohibitions, a negative form of the subjunctive is used: no bengias!, "don't come!". Italian uses the infinitive instead.
- A common occurrence of a left-dislocated construction: cussa cantone apo cantadu.
- * In yes/no questions, fronting of a constituent is required, though it is not specifically a question-formation process: Cumprendiu m'as?, Mandicatu at?, Fattu l'at, etc.
- Interrogative phrases might be constructed like echo questions, with the interrogative marker remaining in underlying position: Sunt lòmpios cando?, Juanne at pigadu olìas cun chie?, etc.
- Impersonal sentence constructions are commonly used to replace the passive voice, which is limited to the formal register: A Juanni ddu ant mortu rather than Juanni est istadu mortu.
- The use of non de + noun: non de abba, abbardente est ; non de frades, parent inimigos.
- The use of ca or chi as subordinate conjunctions: Ja nau ti l'apo ca est issa sa mere.
- Existential uses of àer / ài and èsser / èssi : B'at prus de chentu persones inoghe!, Nci funt is pratus in mesa.
- Ite + adjective + chi: Ite bellu chi ses!.
- Nominal syntagmas without having a head: Cussu ditzionariu de gregu est prus mannu de su de Efis, Cudda machina est prus manna de sa de Juanne.
- Extraposition of the lexical head: Imprestami su tou de ditzionariu.
- Ancu + subjunctive as a way to express a wish on someone: Ancu ti falet unu lampu!.
- Prepositional accusative: Apo bidu a Maria.
- Insertion of the affirmative particle ja / giai: Ja m'apo corcau.
- * Use of the same particle to express antiphrastic formulas: Jai ses totu istudiatu, tue!.
- Reflexive use of intransitive verbs: Tziu Pascale si nch'est mortu eris sero, Mi nch'apo dormiu pro una parica de oras.
- Use of àer in reflexive sentences: Si at fertu a s'anca traballende.
- Combination of the perfective and progressive verb aspect: Est istadu traballende totu sa die".
- Continuous and progressive aspect of the verb, which is meant to indicate an effective situation rather than typical or habitual: Non ti so cumprendende.
- Relative lack of adverbs: with the exception of some localized words like the Nuorese mescamente'', 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.
Vocabulary
Varieties
Historically, the Sardinians have always been quite a small population scattered across isolated cantons, sharing similar demographic patterns with 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 varieties spoken by roughly half of the entire community: the dialects spoken in North-Central Sardinia, centered on the orthography known as Logudorese, and the dialects spoken in Central Southern Sardinia, centered on another orthography called Campidanese. All the Sardinian dialects differ primarily in phonetics, which does not hamper intelligibility; the view of there being a dialectal boundary separating the Campidanese and Logudorese varieties has been in fact subjected to more recent research, that 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 and a Caput Calaris 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 considered characteristic for two different, albeit very closely related, languages. ISO 639 counts four Sardinian languages, each with its own language code.
The dialects centered on the Logudorese model are generally considered more conservative, with the Nuorese subdialect being the most conservative of all. They have all retained the classical Latin pronunciation of the stop velars, the front middle vowels and assimilation of close-mid vowels. Labio-velars become plain labials. I is prosthesized before consonant clusters beginning in s. An east-west strip of villages in central Sardinia speaks a transitional group of dialects. Examples include is limbas and is abbas. The dialects centered on the Campidanese model, spreading from Cagliari, show relatively more influences from Carthage, Rome, Constantinople and Late Latin. Examples include is fruminis and is domus.
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. Sassari, the second-largest city on Sardinia and the main center of the northern half of the island, is located there. There are also two language islands, the Catalan Algherese-speaking community from the inner city of Alghero and the Ligurian-speaking towns of Carloforte, in San Pietro Island, and Calasetta in Sant'Antioco island.
Standardization
Sardinian has already been a standardized language since the Middle Ages, even if the process led to the emergence of the above-mentioned models of Logudorese and Campidanese. However, some attempts have been made to introduce a single writing system for administrative purposes over the recent decades, but they have not been generally acknowledged by native speakers.The Regional Council Deliberations no. 52/105 of 28 December 1999 and n. 59/117 of 29 December 1998 appointed the Committee members with the goal of investigating a single orthographic form and devise a project of linguistic unification. 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. The output of the Committee was the "Limba Sarda Unificada". Its rules were published in 2001 by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, but were met with some criticism about their overall focus on the more conservative varieties, and was eventually not adopted by the regional Council.
The Regional Council Deliberation no. 20/15 of 9 May 2005 thus appointed 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. Their job involved a program of measures for the protection and promotion of the Sardinian language, by means of a guide to be used by the regional administration. The Committee's output, called "Limba Sarda Comuna", was experimentally adopted by the Sardinian regional authority with the Regional Council Deliberation no. 16/14 of 18 April 2006. 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". This work does not refer to morphology and syntax, which is already fairly homogeneous, and concerns itself primarily with spelling.