32 Facts About 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 Sardinian language that is closest to Latin among all its genealogical descendants.

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 use in the family, cultural reproduction, use in the community, prestige, use in institutions, use in education".

Sardinian language 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.

The significant degree to which the Sardinian language has retained its Latin base was noted by the French geographer Maurice Le Lannou during a research project on the island in 1941.

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Indeed, Sardinian language 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.

The language is posited to have substratal influences from Paleo-Sardinian, which some scholars have linked to Basque and Etruscan; comparisons have been drawn with the Berber languages from North Africa to shed more light on the language spoken in Sardinia prior to its Romanization.

In terms of vocabulary, Sardinian language retains an array of peculiar Latin-based forms that are either unfamiliar to, or have altogether disappeared in, the rest of the Romance-speaking world.

The Arborean judges' effort to unify the Sardinian language dialects were due to their desire 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 and .

Dante's view on the Sardinians is proof of how their language had been following its own course in a way which was already unintelligible to non-islanders, and had become, in Wagner's words, an impenetrable "sphinx" to their judgment.

The first document containing Sardinian language elements is a 1063 donation to the abbey of Montecassino signed by Barisone I of Torres.

Nevertheless, the Sardinian language did not disappear from official use: the Catalan juridical tradition in the cities coexisted with that of the Sardinians, marked in 1421 by the Parliamentary extension of the Arborean to the feudal areas during the Reign of King Alfonso the Magnanimous, and Sardinian continued to be used in documents pertaining to administrative and ecclesiastical spheres until the late 17th century.

People from the neighbouring island of Corsica, which had been already Tuscanised, began to settle en masse in the northern Sardinian language coast, leading to the birth of Sassarese and then Gallurese, two Italo-Dalmatian lects.

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.

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 Sardinian language, can be deduced from the study commissioned in 1726 by the Piedmontese administration, to which the Jesuit Antonio Falletti from Barolo responded suggesting the method as the best course of action for Italianization.

The purpose did not elude the attention of the Sardinian ruling class, who deplored the fact that "the Piedmontese bishops have introduced preaching in Italian" and, in an anonymous document attributed to the conservative Sardinian Parliament and eloquently called, denounced how "the arms, the privileges, the laws, the language, University, and currency of Aragon have now been taken away, to the disgrace of Spain, and to the detriment of all particulars".

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 identity crisis of the Sardinian language ruling class, and their strive for acceptance into the new citizenship of the Italian identity, would manifest itself with the publication of the so-called by the unionist Pietro Martini in 1863.

The more ambitious work of the professor and senator Giovanni Spano, the Ortographia sarda nationale, although it was officially meant for the same purpose as Porru's, attempted in reality to establish a unified Sardinian language orthography based on Logudorese, just like Florentine had become the basis for Italian.

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.

The Sardinian language ruling class, drawn to the Italian modernisation stance on Sardinia's desirable path to social "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.

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".

Indeed, during the late 70s reports were released that Sardinian language was on course of being abandoned in favour of Italian in the towns and among the younger generation.

However, by the Eighties the Sardinian language had become a point of ethnic pride: it became a tool through which long held grievances towards the central government's failure at delivering better economic and social conditions could be channeled.

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" .

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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.

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, less than 15 per cent of the Sardinian children use the language to communicate with each other.

The Sardinian language has no prestige and is used in work only as a natural as opposed to a systematic process.

Sardinian language verbs are divided into three main classes, each distinguished by a different infinitive ending .

All the Sardinian language dialects differ primarily in phonetics, which does not considerably hamper intelligibility; the view of there being a dialectal boundary rigidly separating the two varieties of High Sardinian language has been in fact subjected to more recent research, which shows a fluid dialect continuum from the northern to the southern ends of the island.

Dialects centered on the "Logudorese Sardinian language model" are generally considered more conservative, with the Nuorese dialect of Sardinian language being deemed the most conservative of all.

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.