title: Space force

text: When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the Russian Federation gained its space forces, with the Chief Directorate of Space Assets was reorganized into the Military Space Forces, an independent troops ("vid") under the Russian Ministry of Defense, but not a military service ("vid"). The Soviet Air Defense Forces' Anti-Ballistic Missile and Anti-Space Defense Forces were reorganized into the Russian Air Defense Forces' . In 1997, the Rocket and Space Defence Troops and Military Space Forces were merged into the Strategic Missile Forces; it subordinated the priorities of the space troops to the missile forces, resulting in the establishment of the Russian Space Forces as independent troops in 2001. In 2011, the Russian Space Forces became the Russian Space Command, part of the Russian Aerospace Defense Forces, which merged Russia's space and air defense forces into one service. In 2015, the Russian Air Force and Russian Aerospace Defense Forces were merged to form the Russian Aerospace Forces, which reestablished the Russian Space Forces as one of its three sub-branches, although it is no longer an independent entity.


title: Space force

text: In 1998, the Chinese People's Liberation Army began to organize its space forces under the General Armaments Department, before in 2015 reorganizing them as the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force Space Systems Department.


title: Space force

text: The Spanish Government announced in June 2022 that the Spanish Air Force would be renamed as the Spanish Air and Space Force.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: The moonwalk or backslide is a dance move in which the performer glides backwards but their body actions suggest forward motion. The moonwalk is a popping move. It became popular around the world following Michael Jackson's moonwalk during the performance of "Billie Jean" on "," which was broadcast on May 16, 1983, and he included it in tours and live performances. Jackson has been credited as renaming the "backslide" to the moonwalk and it became his signature move.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: An illusion is involved in creating the appearance of the dancer gliding backwards. Initially, the front foot is held flat on the ground, while the back foot is in a tiptoe position. The flat front foot remains on the ground but is sliding lightly and smoothly backward past the tip-toe back foot. What is now the front foot is lowered flat, while the back foot is raised into the tiptoe position. These steps are repeated over and over creating the illusion that the dancer is being pulled backwards by an unseen force while trying to walk forward. Variations of this move allow moonwalking to appear to glide forward, sideways, or even in a circle.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: There are many recorded instances of the moonwalk; similar steps are reported as far back as 1932, used by Cab Calloway. In 1985, Calloway said that the move was called "The Buzz" when he and others performed it in the 1930s.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 1943, Bill Bailey performed the first backslide on screen in the movie The Cabin in the Sky. This dance move most closely resembles the renamed moonwalk. In 1944, Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien portrayed something similar to the move in their performance of "Under the Bamboo Tree" in "Meet Me in St. Louis," though their performance lacks the illusion created by the genuine moonwalk.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 1958, on the "Pat Boone Show", Dick Van Dyke performed a similar variation of the moonwalk and camel walk in his comedy routine called "Mailing a Letter on a Windy Corner".


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 1955, it was recorded in a performance by tap dancer Bill Bailey. He performs a tap routine, and at the end, backslides into the wings. The French mime artist Marcel Marceau used it throughout his career (from the 1940s through the 1980s), as part of the drama of his mime routines. In Marceau's "Walking Against the Wind" routine, he pretends to be pushed backwards by a gust of wind.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 1958, Mexican dancer-comedian Adalberto Martinez "Resortes" also performed the moonwalk in the film "Colegio de Verano" ("Summer School").


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In a November 1969 episode of "H.R. Pufnstuf", Judy the Frog teaches everyone a new dance called "The Moonwalk", which includes two instances of a stationary moonwalk.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: On the April 9, 1970 episode of "The Dick Cavett Show", Marcel Marceau demonstrated several kinds of "mime walks," one of which was a backslide. Cavett tried to do it himself but found it too difficult.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 1972, Lucie Arnaz in "Here's Lucy" Episode 9 of Season 5 "Lucy and Jim Bailey" Lucie does the moonwalk while singing "Fever" with Jim Bailey


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In the late 1970s, the long-running African-American TV dance show "Soul Train" featured a dance troupe called "The Electric Boogaloos" which routinely performed popping and locking dance moves including the moonwalk.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: It has also been acknowledged that the professional wrestlers Michael "Pure Sexy" Hayes, Terry Gordy, and Buddy Roberts started doing the moonwalk as their trademark ring entrance by 1979 when they formed a wrestling stable known as The Fabulous Freebirds.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 1980, in the music video for their single "One Step Ahead" by New Zealand rock band Split Enz, keyboardist Eddie Rayner is seen performing a predecessor of the moonwalk, and Nigel Griggs (former bassist for Split Enz) allegedly taught him how to perform it.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 1981, in the promotional single and music video "Crosseyed and Painless" by new wave band Talking Heads, authentic street dancers, picked by David Byrne, are featuring, including Stephen "Skeeter Rabbit" Nichols doing the moonwalk.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: Another early moonwalker was popper and singer Jeffrey Daniel, who moonwalked in a performance of Shalamar's "A Night to Remember" on "Top of the Pops" in the UK in 1982 and was known to perform backslides in public performances (including weekly "Soul Train" episodes) as far back as 1974. Michael Jackson was a fan of Jeffrey Daniel's dancing and would eventually seek him out.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: Also in 1982, Debbie Allen performs a moonwalk during a scene with Gwen Verdon in Season 1, Episode 10 ("Come One, Come All") of the TV series "Fame".


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In "Flashdance", the move was used in the B-boy scene, where Rock Steady Crew's Mr. Freeze (Marc Lemberger), with an umbrella prop, mimed the wind blowing him backward as he first walks forward, fighting the wind, then starts moonwalking backwards. Mr. Freeze's version was also shown in the first hip hop movie "Wild Style" and Malcolm McLaren film clip "Buffalo Gals".


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In the 1984 movie "Streets of Fire", actor and performer Stoney Jackson executed a moonwalk as the leader of a fictional group, The Sorels, who lip-synced to the Dan Hartman song "I Can Dream About You". The movie was filmed in the northern spring of 1983, also predating the iconic Michael Jackson moonwalk.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: Singer Bobby Brown of New Edition was the one of "three kids" Jackson said taught him the dance step in his autobiography "Moonwalk". It had been rumored that Jeffrey Daniel taught Michael Jackson the moonwalk after the latter saw Daniel perform on "Soul Train" and had his manager call the show to introduce him to the dancer. Daniel was touring with Shalamar at the time, so Derek Cooley Jackson and Caszper Candidate went to teach Jackson. However, Jackson, who later became known as Cooley Jaxson, was not able to pick up and master the technique until Daniel returned from tour and worked with him. Michael Jackson first performed the dance in public on March 25, 1983 during the television special, "", in front of a live audience at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. The dance became world famous two months later when the show made its television premiere. Dressed in his signature black trousers, silver socks, silver shirt, black-sequined jacket, and rhinestoned glove, Jackson spun around, posed, and began moonwalking. Music critic Ian Inglis later wrote that Jackson encapsulated a long tradition of African-American dance movements in that one performance. Moonwalking received widespread attention, and from then on, the moonwalk became Jackson's signature move for his song "Billie Jean". Nelson George said that Jackson's rendition "combined Jackie Wilson's athleticism with James Brown's camel walk". Michael Jackson's autobiography was titled "Moonwalk", and he also starred in a 1988 film titled "Moonwalker".


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: Alexei Kovalev has been known for using the moonwalk in his National Hockey League career. He performed the move after scoring a goal on February 7, 2001, and on January 3, 2010. Kovalev moonwalked onto the ice after being named one of the stars of the game and again after scoring in a 2008 celebrity charity soccer game. In 2009, R&B singer The-Dream teamed up with Kanye West to create the Synthpop-R&B record "Walkin' on the Moon", in which The-Dream includes a Jackson-inspired high note. The music video does not feature the moonwalk, though it plays on the premise with a CGI moon background and a simple 2-step by the singer to give the impression he is "walkin' on the moon."


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 2019, street dancer Salif Gueye performed the moonwalk in David Guetta's music video for the song "Stay (Don't Go Away)".


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 2019, Chinese boy group WayV released a song called "天选之城 (Moonwalk)". The moonwalk is featured in the music video.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 2020, the band Puscifer briefly features the moonwalk in their video "Apocalyptical" and it is also mentioned in the song's lyrics.


title: Moonwalk (dance)

text: In 2020, South-Korean boy band BTS performed the moonwalk briefly in the music video of their song "Dynamite".


title: Sardinian language

text: Sardinian or Sard ( , or ) is a Romance language spoken by the Sardinians on the Western Mediterranean island of Sardinia.


title: Sardinian language

text: Many Romance linguists consider it the language that is closest to Latin among all its genealogical descendants. However, it has also incorporated elements of a Pre-Latin (mostly Paleo-Sardinian and, to a much lesser degree, Punic) substratum, as well as a Byzantine Greek, Catalan, Spanish and Italian superstratum. These elements 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, 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 early 18th century onward, under the contemporary Italian one.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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, and in 1999, Sardinian and eleven other "historical linguistic minorities", i.e. locally indigenous, and not foreign-grown, minority languages of Italy (, as defined by the legislator) were similarly recognized as such by national law (specifically, Law No. 482/1999). Among these, Sardinian is notable as having, in terms of absolute numbers, the largest community of speakers.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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; The Sardinian adult population would today no longer be able to carry on a single conversation in the ethnic language, as it is used exclusively by 0.6 percent of the total, and less than 15 percent of the new generations were reported to have been passed down some residual Sardinian in a deteriorated form described by linguist Roberto Bolognesi as "an ungrammatical slang".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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".


title: Sardinian language

text: As the great majority of Sardinians have long almost completely assimilated into Italian and therefore now only happen to keep a fragmentary knowledge of their native and once first spoken language, the use of which being therefore quite limited in both scope and frequency, Sardinian has been classified by UNESCO as "definitely endangered".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 it is possible that it shall be referred to as merely constituting the substratum of the one prevailing now, Italian in its own Sardinian-influenced variety, rather than as a living tongue spoken by the islanders.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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. 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 (, "the Way of Straw") also recurs in the Berber languages.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 linguistic group among the Romance languages.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: The origins of ancient Sardinian, also known as Paleo-Sardinian, are currently unknown. Research has attempted to discover obscure, indigenous, pre-Romance roots. The root "s(a)rd", indicating many place names as well as the island's people, is reportedly either associated with or originating from the Sherden, one of the Sea Peoples. Other sources trace instead the root "s(a)rd" from , a legendary woman from the Anatolian Kingdom of Lydia, or from the Libyan mythological figure of the Sardus Pater "Babai" ("Sardinian Father" or "Father of the Sardinians").


title: Sardinian language

text: 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. Words like "giara" ‘plateau’ (cf. Hebrew "yaʿar" ‘forest, scrub’), "g(r)uspinu" ‘nasturtium’ (from Punic "cusmin"), "curma" ‘fringed rue’ (cf. Arabic "ḥarmal" ‘Syrian rue’), "mítza" ‘spring’ (cf. Hebrew "mitsa", "metza" ‘source, fountainhead’), "síntziri" ‘marsh horsetail’ (from Punic "zunzur" ‘common knotgrass’), "tzeúrra" ‘sprout’ (from *"zerula", diminutive of Punic "zeraʿ" ‘seed’), "tzichirìa" ‘dill’ (from Punic "sikkíria"; cf. Hebrew "šēkār" ‘ale’) and "tzípiri" ‘rosemary’ (from Punic "zibbir") are commonly used, especially in the modern Sardinian varieties of the Campidanese plain, while proceeding northwards the influence is more limited to place names, such as the town of Magomadas, "Macumadas" in Nuoro or "Magumadas" in Gesico and Nureci, all of which deriving from the Punic "maqom hadash" "new city".


title: Sardinian language

text: The Roman domination began in 238 BC, but was often contested by the local Sardinian tribes, who had by then acquired a high level of political organization, and would manage to only partly supplant the pre-Latin Sardinian languages, including Punic. Although the colonists and "negotiatores" (businessmen) of strictly Italic descent would later play a relevant role in introducing and spreading Latin to Sardinia, Romanisation proved slow to take hold among the Sardinian natives, whose proximity to the Carthaginian cultural influence was noted by Roman authors. Punic continued to be spoken well into the 3rd–4th century AD, as attested by votive inscriptions, and it is thought that the natives from the most interior areas, led by the tribal chief Hospito, joined their brethren in making the switch to Latin around the 7th century AD, through their conversion to Christianity. Cicero, who loathed the Sardinians on the ground of numerous factors, such as their outlandish language, their kinship with Carthage and their refusal to engage with Rome, would call the Sardinian rebels "latrones mastrucati" ("thieves with rough wool cloaks") or "Afri" ("Africans") to emphasize Roman superiority over a population mocked as the refuse of Carthage.


title: Sardinian language

text: A number of obscure Nuragic roots remained unchanged, and in many cases Latin accepted the local roots (like "nur", presumably cognate of Norax, which makes its appearance in nuraghe, "Nurra", "Nurri" and many other toponyms). Barbagia, the mountainous central region of the island, derives its name from the Latin "Barbaria" (a term meaning "Land of the Barbarians", similar in origin to the now antiquated word "Barbary"), because its people refused cultural and linguistic assimilation for a long time: 50% of toponyms of central Sardinia, particularly in the territory of Olzai, are actually not related to any known language. According to Terracini, amongst the regions in Europe that went on to draw their language from Latin, Sardinia has overall preserved the highest proportion of pre-Latin toponyms. 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: By the end of the Roman domination, Latin had gradually become however the speech of most of the island's inhabitants. As a result of this protracted and prolonged process of Romanisation, the modern Sardinian language is today classified as Romance or neo-Latin, with some phonetic features resembling Old Latin. Some linguists assert that modern Sardinian, being part of the Island Romance group, was the first language to split off from Latin, all others evolving from Latin as Continental Romance. In fact, contact with Rome might have ceased from as early as the first century BC. In terms of vocabulary, Sardinian retains an array of peculiar Latin-based forms that are either unfamiliar to, or have altogether disappeared in, the rest of the Romance-speaking world.


title: Sardinian language

text: The number of Latin inscriptions on the island is relatively small and fragmented. Some engraved poems in ancient Greek and Latin (the two most prestigious languages in the Roman Empire) are seen in the so-called "Viper's Cave" ("Gruta 'e sa Pibera" in Sardinian, "Grotta della Vipera" in Italian, "Cripta Serpentum" in Latin), a burial monument built in Caralis (Cagliari) by Lucius Cassius Philippus (a Roman who had been exiled to Sardinia) in remembrance of his dead spouse Atilia Pomptilla; we also have some religious works by Eusebius and Saint Lucifer, both from Caralis and in the writing style of whom may be noted the lexicon and perifrastic forms typical of Sardinian (e.g. in place of ; compare with Sardinian or "to say").


title: Sardinian language

text: After a period of 80 years under the Vandals, Sardinia would again be part of the Byzantine Empire under the Exarchate of Africa for almost another five centuries. Luigi Pinelli believes that the Vandal presence had "estranged Sardinia from Europe, linking its own destiny to Africa's territorial expanse" in a bond that was to strengthen further "under Byzantine rule, not only because the Roman Empire included the island in the African Exarchate, but also because it developed from there, albeit indirectly, its ethnic community, causing it to acquire many of the African characteristics" that would allow ethnologists and historians to elaborate the theory of the Paleo-Sardinians' supposed African origin, now disproved. Casula is convinced that the Vandal domination caused a "clear breaking with the Roman-Latin writing tradition or, at the very least, an appreciable bottleneck" so that the subsequent Byzantine government was able to establish "its own operational institutions" in a "territory disputed between the Greek- and the Latin-speaking world".


title: Sardinian language

text: Despite a period of almost five centuries, the Greek language only lent Sardinian a few ritual and formal expressions using Greek structure and, sometimes, the Greek alphabet. Evidence for this is found in the "condaghes", the first written documents in Sardinian. From the long Byzantine era there are only a few entries but they already provide a glimpse of the sociolinguistical situation on the island in which, in addition to the community's everyday Neo-Latin language, Greek was also spoken by the ruling classes. Some toponyms, such as Jerzu (thought to derive from the Greek "khérsos", "untilled"), together with the personal names Mikhaleis, Konstantine and Basilis, demonstrate Greek influence.


title: Sardinian language

text: As the Muslims made their way into North Africa, what remained of the Byzantine possession of the Exarchate was only the Balearic Islands and Sardinia. Pinelli believes that this event constituted a fundamental watershed in the historical course of Sardinia, leading to the definitive severance of those previously close cultural ties between Sardinia and the southern shore of the Mediterranean: any previously held commonality shared between Sardinia and Africa “disappeared, like mist in the sun, as a result of North Africa's conquest by Islamic forces, since the latter, due to the fierce resistance of the Sardinians, were not able to spread to the island, as they had in Africa”. Michele Amari, quoted by Pinelli, writes that "the attempts of the Muslims of Africa to conquer Sardinia and Corsica were frustrated by the unconquered valour of the poor and valiant inhabitants of those islands, who saved themselves for two centuries from the yoke of the Arabs".


title: Sardinian language

text: As the Byzantines were fully focused on reconquering southern Italy and Sicily, which had in the meanwhile also fallen to the Muslims, their attention on Sardinia was neglected and communications broke down with Constantinople; this spurred the former Byzantine province of Sardinia to become progressively more autonomous from the Byzantine oecumene, and eventually attain independence. Pinelli argues that "the Arab conquest of North Africa separated Sardinia from that continent without, however, causing the latter to rejoin Europe" and that this event "determined a capital turning point for Sardinia, giving rise to a "de facto" independent national government".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 had cut off any ties left between the island and Byzantium. The exceptionality of the Sardinian situation, which in this sense constitutes a unique case throughout the Latin-speaking Europe, consists in the fact that any official text was written solely in Sardinian from the very beginning and completely excluded Latin, unlike what was happening – and would continue to happen – in France, Italy and Iberia at the same time; Latin, although co-official, was in fact used only in documents concerning external relations in which the Sardinian kings ("judikes", "judges") engaged. Awareness of the dignity of Sardinian for official purposes was such that, in the words of Livio Petrucci, a Neo-Latin language had come to be used "at a time when nothing similar can be observed in the Italian peninsula" not only "in the legal field" but also "in any other field of writing".


title: Sardinian language

text: Old Sardinian had a greater number of archaisms and Latinisms than the present language does, with few Germanic words, mostly coming from Latin itself, and even fewer Arabisms, which had been imported by scribes from Iberia; in spite of their best efforts with a score of expeditions to the island, from which they would get considerable booty and a hefty number of Sardinian slaves, the Arab assailants were in fact each time forcefully driven back and would never manage to conquer and settle on the island.


title: Sardinian language

text: Although the surviving texts come from such disparate areas as the north and the south of the island, Sardinian then presented itself in a rather homogeneous form: even though the orthographic differences between Logudorese and Campidanese Sardinian were beginning to appear, Wagner found in this period "the original unity of the Sardinian language". In agreement with Wagner is Paolo Merci, who found a "broad uniformity" around this period, as were Antonio Sanna and Ignazio Delogu too, for whom it was the islanders' community life that prevented Sardinian from localism. According to Carlo Tagliavini, these earlier documents show the existence of a Sardinian Koine which pointed to a model based on Logudorese.


title: Sardinian language

text: According to Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, it was in the wake of the fall of the Judicates of Cagliari and Gallura, in the second half of the 13th century, that Sardinian began to fragment into its modern dialects, undergoing some Tuscanization under the rule of the Republic of Pisa; it did not take long before the Genoese too started carving their own sphere of influence in northern Sardinia, both through the mixed Sardinian-Genoese nobility of Sassari and the members of the Doria family. A certain range of dialectal variation is then noted.


title: Sardinian language

text: A special position was occupied by the Judicate of Arborea, the last Sardinian kingdom to fall to foreign powers, in which a transitional dialect was spoken, that of Middle Sardinian. The Carta de Logu of the Kingdom of Arborea, one of the first constitutions in history drawn up in 1355–1376 by Marianus IV and the Queen, the "Lady Judge" ( in Sardinian, in Catalan, in Italian) Eleanor, was written in this transitional variety of Sardinian, and would remain in force until 1827. The Arborean judges' effort to unify the Sardinian dialects were due to their desire to be legitimate rulers of the entire island under a single state ( "Sardinian Republic"); such political goal, after all, was already manifest in 1164, when the Arborean Judge Barison ordered his great seal to be made with the writings ("Barison, by the grace of God, King of Sardinia") and ("The people's rule is equal to the Sardinians' own force").


title: Sardinian language

text: Dante Alighieri wrote in his 1302–05 essay "De vulgari eloquentia" that Sardinians were strictly speaking not Italians (), even though they appeared superficially similar to them, and they did not speak anything close to a Neo-Latin language of their own (), but resorted to aping straightforward Latin instead. Dante's view on the Sardinians, however, 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. Frequently mentioned is a previous 12th-century poem by the troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, "Domna, tant vos ai preiada" ("Lady, so much I have endeared you"); Sardinian epitomizes outlandish speech therein, along with non-Romance languages such as German and Berber, with the troubadour having the lady say "" ("I don't understand you more than a German or Sardinian or Berber"); the Tuscan poet Fazio degli Uberti refers to the Sardinians in his poem as "" ("a people that no one is able to understand / nor do they come to a knowledge of what other peoples say about them").


title: Sardinian language

text: The Muslim geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who lived in Palermo, Sicily at the court of King Roger II, wrote in his work ("The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands" or, simply, "The book of Roger") that "Sardinians are ethnically , like the Berbers; they shun contacts with all the other nations and are people of purpose and valiant that never leave the arms". According to Wagner, the close relationship in the development of Vulgar Latin between North Africa and Sardinia might not have only derived from ancient ethnic affinities between the two populations, but also from their common political past within the Exarchate of Africa.


title: Sardinian language

text: What literature is left to us from this period primarily consists of legal and administrative documents, besides the aforementioned and . The first document containing Sardinian elements is a 1063 donation to the abbey of Montecassino signed by Barisone I of Torres. Another such document (the so-called "Carta Volgare") comes from the Judicate of Cagliari and was issued by Torchitorio I de Lacon-Gunale in around 1070, written in Sardinian whilst still employing the Greek alphabet. Other documents are the 1080 "Logudorese Privilege", the 1089 Torchitorius' Donation (in the Marseille archives), the 1190–1206 Marsellaise Chart (in Campidanese Sardinian) and an 1173 communication between the Bishop Bernardo of Civita and Benedetto, who oversaw the Opera del Duomo in Pisa. The Statutes of Sassari (1316) and Castelgenovese (c. 1334) are written in Logudorese Sardinian.


title: Sardinian language

text: The first chronicle in "lingua sive ydiomate sardo", called , was published anonymously in the 13th century, relating the events of the Judicate of Torres.


title: Sardinian language

text: The 1297 feoffment of Sardinia by Pope Boniface VIII led to the creation of the Kingdom of Sardinia: that is, of a state which, although lacking in "summa potestas", entered by right as a member in personal union within the broader Mediterranean structure of the Crown of Aragon. Thus began a long war between the latter and, to the cry of , from 1353, the previously allied Judicate of Arborea, in which the Sardinian language was to play the role of an ethnic marker.


title: Sardinian language

text: The war had, among its motives, a never dormant and ancient Arborean political design to establish "a great island nation-state, wholly indigenous" which was assisted by the massive participation of the rest of the Sardinians, i.e. those not residing within the jurisdiction of Arborea ("Sardus de foras"), as well as a widespread impatience with the foreign importation of a feudal regime that threatened the survival of deep-rooted indigenous institutions and, far from ensuring the return of the island to a unitary regime, had only introduced there ""tot reges quot sunt ville"" ("as many petty rulers as there are villages").


title: Sardinian language

text: The conflict between the two sovereign and warring parties, ending after sixty-seven years with the Aragonese victory at Sanluri in 1409 and the renunciation of any succession right signed by William II of Narbonne in 1420, marked the definitive end of Sardinian independence whose historical relevance for the island, likened by Francesco C. Casula to "the end of Aztec Mexico", should be considered "neither triumph nor defeat, but the painful birth of today's Sardinia". Any outbreak of anti-Aragonese rebellion, such as the revolt of Alghero in 1353, that of Uras in 1470 and finally that of Macomer in 1478, celebrated in , were and would have been systematically neutralised. From that moment, "".


title: Sardinian language

text: Casula believes that the Aragonese winners from the brutal conflict would then move on to destroy the pre-existing documentary production of the still living Sardinian Judicate, which was predominantly written in Sardinian language along with other ones the chancery was engaged with, leaving behind their trail only "a few stones" and, overall, a "small group of documents", many of which are in fact still preserved and/or refer to archives outside the island. Specifically, the Arborean documents and the palace in which they were kept would be completely set on fire on May 21, 1478, as the viceroy triumphantly entered Oristano after having tamed the aforementioned 1478 rebellion, which threatened the revival of an Arborean identity which had been "de jure" abolished in 1420 but was still very much alive in popular memory.


title: Sardinian language

text: Thereafter, the ruling class in Sardinia proceeded to adopt Catalan as their primary language. The situation in Cagliari, a city subject to Aragonese repopulation and where, according to Giovanni Francesco Fara ( / ), for a time Catalan took over Sardinian as in Alghero, was emblematic, so much so as to later generate idioms such as ("he does not know Catalan") to indicate a person who could not express themselves "correctly". Alghero is still a Catalan-speaking enclave on Sardinia to this day. 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. Fara, in the same first modern monograph dedicated to Sardinia, reported the lively multilingualism in "one and the same people", because of immigration "by Spaniards and Italians" who came to the island to trade with the native Sardinians.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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, which had been already Tuscanised, began to settle en masse in the northern Sardinian coast, leading to the birth of Sassarese and then Gallurese, two Italo-Dalmatian lects.


title: Sardinian language

text: Despite Catalan being widely spoken and written on the island at this time (leaving a lasting influence in Sardinian), there are written records of Sardinian, one of which is the 15th-century , written by Antòni Canu (1400–1476) and published in 1557.


title: Sardinian language

text: The 16th century is instead marked by a new literary revival of Sardinian, which was estimated to be the native people's ordinary language by the Jesuits in 1561. , by Hieronimu Araolla, was aimed at "glorifying and enriching Sardinian, our language" () as the Spanish, French and Italian poets had already done for their own languages ( and ). This way, Araolla is one of the first Sardinian authors to bind the language to a Sardinian nation, the existence of which is not outright stated but naturally implied. Antonio Lo Frasso, a poet born in Alghero (a city he remembered fondly) who spent his life in Barcelona, wrote lyric poetry in Sardinian.


title: Sardinian language

text: Agreeing with Fara's aforementioned , the Sardinian attorney Sigismondo Arquer, author of in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia universalis (whose report would also be quoted in Conrad Gessner's "On the different languages used by the various nations across the globe" with minor variations), stated that Sardinian prevailed in most of the Kingdom, with particular regard for the rural interior, while Catalan and Spanish were spoken in the cities, where the predominantly Iberian ruling class "occupies most of the official positions"; although the Sardinian language had become fragmented due to foreign domination (i.e. "namely Latins, Pisans, Genoese, Spanish, and Africans"), Arquer pointed to there being many Sardinian words with apparently no traceable origin and reported that Sardinians nevertheless "understand each other perfectly".


title: Sardinian language

text: The sociolinguistic situation was characterised by the active and passive competence of the two Iberian languages in the cities and of Sardinian in the rest of the island, as reported in various contemporary testimonies: Cristòfor Despuig, in , claimed in 1557 that, although Catalan had carved out a place for itself as , in many parts of the island the "ancient language of the Kingdom" (""llengua antigua del Regne"") was still preserved; the ambassador and Martin Carillo (supposed author of the ironic judgment on the Sardinians' tribal and sectarian divisions: “" "few, thickheaded, and badly united") noted in 1611 that the main cities spoke Catalan and Spanish, but outside these cities no other language was understood than Sardinian, which in turn was understood by everyone in the entire Kingdom; Joan Gaspar Roig i Jalpí, author of , reported in the mid-seventeenth century that in Sardinia "" ("they speak Catalan very well, as though I was in Catalonia"); Anselm Adorno, originally from Genoa but living in Bruges, noted in his pilgrimages how, many foreigners notwithstanding, the natives still spoke their own language ();); another testimony is offered by the rector of the Jesuit college of Sassari Baldassarre Pinyes who, in Rome, wrote: "As far as the Sardinian language is concerned, Your Paternity should know that it is not spoken in this city, nor in Alghero, nor in Cagliari: it is only spoken in the towns".


title: Sardinian language

text: Especially through the reorganization of the monarchy led by the Count-Duke of Olivares, Sardinia would gradually join a broad Spanish cultural sphere. Spanish was perceived as an elitist language, gaining solid ground among the ruling Sardinian class; Spanish had thus a profound influence on Sardinian, especially in those words, styles and cultural models owing to the prestigious international role of the Habsburg monarchy as well as the Court. Most Sardinian authors would write in both Spanish and Sardinian until the 19th century and were well-versed in the former, like Vicente Bacallar y Sanna that was one of the founders of the Real Academia Española; according to Bruno Anatra's estimates, around 87% of the books printed in Cagliari were in Spanish. A notable exception was Pedro Delitala (1550–1590), who decided to write in Italian instead. Nonetheless, the Sardinian language retained much of its importance, earning respect from the Spaniards in light of it being the ethnic code the people from most of the Kingdom kept using, especially in the interior. New genres of popular poetry were established around this period, like the or (sacred hymns), the (lullabies), the (funeral laments), the (quatrains), the and (curses), and the improvised poetry of the and .


title: Sardinian language

text: 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".


title: Sardinian language

text: Ioan Matheu Garipa, a priest from Orgosolo who translated the Italian into Sardinian () in 1627, was the first author to claim that Sardinian was the closest living relative of classical Latin and, like Araolla before him, valued Sardinian as the language of a specific ethno-national community. In this regard, the philologist Paolo Maninchedda argues that by doing so, these authors did not write "about Sardinia or in Sardinian to fit into an island system, but to inscribe Sardinia and its language – and with them, themselves – in a European system. Elevating Sardinia to a cultural dignity equal to that of other European countries also meant promoting the Sardinians, and in particular their educated countrymen, who felt that they had no roots and no place in the continental cultural system".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 in fact technically remain an island state with its own traditions and institutions, albeit without "summa potestas" and in personal union as an overseas possession of the House of Savoy.


title: Sardinian language

text: The Sardinian language, although practiced in a state of diglossia, continued to be spoken by all social classes, its linguistic alterity and independence being universally perceived; 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".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 (), 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 ("Account of the proposed ways to introduce the Italian language to this Kingdom") commissioned in 1726 by the Piedmontese administration, to which the Jesuit Antonio Falletti from Barolo responded suggesting the ("to introduce an unknown language [Italian] through a known one [Spanish]") method as the best course of action for Italianization. In the same year, Victor Amadeus II had already said he could no longer tolerate the lack of ability to speak Italian on the part of the islanders, in view of the inconveniences that such inability was putting through for the functionaries sent from the Mainland. Restrictions to mixed marriages between Sardinian women and the Piedmontese officers dispatched to the island, which had hitherto been prohibited by law, were at one point lifted and even encouraged so as to better introduce the language to the local population.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 ("great hunt"), was that the islanders spoke "a horrible language, as intricate as Saracen, and sounding like Spanish".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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". 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 ("Grievance of the Kingdom"), 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".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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, while parish registers and official deeds continued to be drawn up in Spanish until 1828. The most immediate effect of the order was thus the marginalization of Sardinian, making way for the Italianization of the island. For the first time, in fact, even the wealthy and most powerful families of rural Sardinia, the , started to perceive Sardinian as a handicap. Girolamo Sotgiu asserts on the matter that "the Sardinian ruling class, just as it had become Hispanicized, now became Italianised, without ever managing to become Sardinian, that is to say, to draw from the experience and culture of their people, from which it came, those elements of concreteness without which a culture and a ruling class always seem foreign even in their homeland. This was the objective that the Savoyard government had set itself and which, to a good measure, it managed to pursue".


title: Sardinian language

text: Francesco Gemelli, in , depicts the island's linguistic pluralism in 1776, and referring to Francesco Cetti's for a more thorough examination of "the character of the Sardinian language ("") and the main differences between Sassarese and Tuscan": "five languages are spoken in Sardinia, that is Spanish, Italian, Sardinian, Algherese, and Sassarese. The former two because of the past and today's domination, and they are understood and spoken through schooling by all the educated people residing in the cities, as well as villages. Sardinian is common to all the Kingdom, and is divided into two main dialects, Campidanese Sardinian and Sardinian from the Upper Half (""). Algherese is a Catalan dialect, for a Catalan colony is Alghero; and finally Sassarese, which is spoken in Sassari, Tempio and Castel sardo ("sic"), is a dialect of Tuscan, a relic of their Pisan overlords. Spanish is losing ground to Italian, which has taken over the former in the fields of education and jurisdiction".


title: Sardinian language

text: The first systematic study on the Sardinian language was written in 1782 by the philologist Matteo Madau, with the title of . The patriotic intention that motivated Madau was to trace the ideal path through which Sardinian could grow to be the island's proper national language; nevertheless, the Savoyard climate of repression on Sardinian culture would induce Matteo Madau to veil its radical proposals with some literary devices, and the author was eventually unable to ever translate them into reality. The first volume of comparative Sardinian dialectology was produced in 1786 by the Catalan Jesuit Andres Febres, known in Italy and Sardinia by the pseudonym of , who returned from Lima where he had first published a book of Mapuche grammar in 1764. After he moved to Cagliari, he became fascinated with the Sardinian language as well and conducted some research on three specific dialects; the aim of his work, entitled , was to "write down the rules of the Sardinian language" and spur the Sardinians to "cherish the language of their Homeland, as well as Italian". The government in Turin, which had been monitoring Febres' activity, decided that his work would not be allowed to be published: Victor Amadeus III had supposedly not appreciated the fact that the book had a bilingual dedication to him in Italian and Sardinian, a mistake that his successors, while still echoing back to a general concept of "Sardinian ancestral homeland", would from then on avoid, and making exclusive use of Italian to produce their works.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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's rule and institute an independent Sardinian Republic under French protection; all over the island, a number of political pamphlets printed in Sardinian were illegally distributed, calling for a mass revolt against the Piedmontese rule and the barons' abuse. The most famous literary product born out of such political unrest was the poem , noted as a testament of the French-inspired democratic and patriotic values, as well as Sardinia's situation under feudalism. 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”. In fact, although pamphlets such as "the Achilles of Sardinian Liberation" circulated, denouncing the backwardness of an oppressive feudal system and a Ministry that was said to have “always been the enemy of the Sardinian Nation”, and the “social pact between the Sovereign and the Nation” was declared to have been broken, there was no radical change in the form of government: therefore, it is not surprising, according to Sotgiu, that although “the call for the Sardinian nation, its traditions and identity became stronger and stronger, even to the point of requesting the creation of a stable military force of "Sardinian nationals only"”, the concrete hypothesis of abolishing the monarchical and feudal regimes did not “make its way into the consciousness of many”. 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" and, conversely, the victory of the feudal barons and "of large strata of the town bourgeoisie that had developed within the framework of the feudal order and feared that the abolition of feudalism and the proclamation of the Republic might simultaneously destroy the very basis of their own wealth and prestige".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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, other Sardinian intellectuals, all characterized by an attitude of general devotion to their island as well as proven loyalty to the House of Savoy, posed in fact the question of the Sardinian language, while being careful enough to use only Italian as a language to get their point across. During the 19th century in particular, the Sardinian intellectuality and ruling class found itself divided over the adherence to the Sardinian national values and the allegiance to the new Italian nationality, toward which they eventually leaned in the wake of the abortive Sardinian revolution. The identity crisis of the Sardinian ruling class, and their strive for acceptance into the new citizenship of the Italian identity, would manifest itself with the publication of the so-called by the unionist Pietro Martini in 1863.


title: Sardinian language

text: A few years after the major anti-Piedmontese revolt, in 1811, the priest Vincenzo Raimondo Porru published a timid essay of Sardinian grammar, which, however, referred expressively to the Southern dialect (hence the title of ) and, out of prudence towards the king, was made with the declared intention of easing the acquisition of Italian among his fellow Sardinians, instead of protecting their language. The more ambitious work of the professor and senator Giovanni Spano, the "Ortographia sarda nationale" ("Sardinian National Orthography"), although it was officially meant for the same purpose as Porru's, attempted in reality to establish a unified Sardinian orthography based on Logudorese, just like Florentine had become the basis for Italian.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 promote these tendencies even more in order “to profit from them in the common interest”, for which it proved “almost necessary” to spread the Italian language in Sardinia “presently so little known in the interior” with a view to better enable the Perfect Fusion: “Sardinia will be Piedmont, it will be Italy; it will receive and give us lustre, wealth and power!".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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. The Italian education, being imparted in a language the Sardinians were not familiar with, spread Italian for the first time in history to Sardinian villages, marking the troubled transition to the new dominant language; the school environment, which employed Italian as the sole means of communication, grew to become a microcosm around the then-monolingual Sardinian villages. In 1811, the canon Salvatore Carboni published in Bologna the polemic book ("Holy Discourses in Sardinian language"), wherein the author lamented the fact that Sardinia, “" ("Being an Italian province nowadays, [Sardinia] cannot have laws and public acts made in its own language"), and while claiming that "" ("the Sardinian language, however unofficial, will last as long as Sardinia among the Sardinians"), he also asked himself "" ("Why should we show neglect and contempt for Sardinian, which is a language as ancient and noble as Italian, French and Spanish?").


title: Sardinian language

text: In 1827, the historical legal code serving as the "consuetud de la nació sardesca" in the days of the Iberian rule, the "Carta de Logu", was abolished and replaced by the more advanced Savoyard code of Charles Felix ""Leggi civili e criminali del Regno di Sardegna"", written in Italian. The Perfect Fusion with the Mainland States, enacted under the auspices of a "transplant, without any reserves and obstacles, [of] the culture and civilization of the Italian Mainland to Sardinia", would result in the loss of the island's residual autonomy and marked the moment when "the language of the "Sardinian nation" lost its value as an instrument with which to ethnically identify a particular people and its culture, to be codified and cherished, and became instead one of the many regional dialects subordinated to the national language".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 / , 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 (, Berlin, 1840) and, later, in the second edition of (1856–1860) written by Friedrich Christian Diez, credited as one of the founders of Romance philology. The pioneering research of German authors spurred a certain interest in the Sardinian language on the part of some Italian scholars, such as Graziadio Isaia Ascoli and, above all, his disciple Pier Enea Guarnerio, who was the first in Italy to classify Sardinian as a separate member of the Romance language family without subordinating it to the group of "Italian dialects", as was previously the custom in Italy. 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 (, in , 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: During the mobilization for World War I, the Italian Army compelled all people on the island that were "of Sardinian stock" () 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 trasmit 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: “".


title: Sardinian language

text: The Sardinian-born philosopher Antonio Gramsci commented on the Sardinian linguistic question while writing a letter to his sister Teresina; Gramsci was aware of the long-term ramifications of language shift, and suggested that Teresa let her son acquire Sardinian with no restriction, because doing otherwise would result in "putting his imagination into a straitjacket" as well as him ending up eventually "learning two jargons, and no language at all".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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".


title: Sardinian language

text: The policy of forced assimilation culminated in the twenty years of the Fascist regime, which launched a campaign of violent compression of autonomist demands and finally determined the island's definitive entry into the "national cultural system" through the combined work of the educational system and the one-party system. 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 "Italianization"" by means of, in his words, "a declared war" against the usage of the Sardinian language by fascism and the Catholic Church alike.


title: Sardinian language

text: In 1945, following the restoration of political freedoms, the Sardinian Action Party called for autonomy as a federal state within the "new Italy" that had emerged from the Resistance: it was in the context of the second post-war period that, as consensus for autonomy kept growing, the party began to distinguish itself by policies based on Sardinia's linguistic and cultural specificity.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 later than in other European peripheries marked by the presence of local ethno-linguistic minorities; Sardinian was in fact dismissed by the 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 modernisation stance on how to steer the islanders to "social development", believed in fact that Sardinians had been held back by their own "traditional practices" vis-à-vis the Mainland, and that, in order to catch up with the latter, social and cultural progress could only be brought about through the rejection of said practices. 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 ) for the heavy industrial development of the island.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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".


title: Sardinian language

text: In the meantime, the emphasis on Italian continued, with historical sites and ordinary objects being henceforth popularised in Italian for mass consumption (e.g. the various kinds of "traditional" cheese, instead of , instead of , instead of / , etc.). The Ministry of Public Education once requested that the teachers willing to teach Sardinian be put under surveillance. The rejection of the indigenous language 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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, and his fervor reverberated across the Sardinian society, pushing even some non-nationalist groups to take an interest in matters relating to minorities. Although a law was passed as early as 1955 for the establishment of five professorships of Sardinian linguistics, one of the first demands for bilingualism was 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 () Piras some months before his death in 1977, urging bilingual education to reverse the ongoing trend of cultural De-Sardization.


title: Sardinian language

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


title: Sardinian language

text: A law by popular initiative for Sardinian-Italian bilingualism garnered considerable success as it kept gathering thousands of signatures, but was promptly blocked by the Italian Communist Party and thus never implemented. The same Italian Communist Party would later propose, however, another bill of its own initiative "for the protection of the language and culture of the Sardinian people" in 1980. In the end, following tensions and claims of the Sardinian nationalist movement for concrete cultural and political autonomy, including the recognition of the Sardinians as an ethnic and linguistic minority, three separate bills were eventually presented to the Regional Council in the Eighties. In 1981, the Regional Council debated and voted for the introduction of bilingualism in Sardinia for the first time. As pressure by a resolution of the Council of Europe continued to bear on Italian policy-makers for the protection of minorities, a Commission was appointed in 1982 to investigate the issue; the following year, a bill was presented to the Italian Parliament, but without success. One of the first laws approved by the Sardinian legislator with respect to the protection and promotion of the Sardinian language and culture was soon rejected by the Constitutional Court in 1994, which deemed it "exorbitant in a multitude of ways with regard to the supplementary and implementing powers enjoyed by the Region in matters of education"; it was not until 1997 that Sardinian was finally recognized by the regional law (n. 26 of 15 October 1997 "Promotion and enhancement of the culture and language of Sardinia") without there being any recourse from the Italian central government; this law too, however, would prove to be more focused on the traditions and history of the Sardinian people than their language in itself.


title: Sardinian language

text: A survey conducted by MAKNO in 1984 showed that three-quarters of the Sardinians had a positive attitude towards bilingual education (22% of the interviewees, especially in the Province of Nuoro and Oristano, wanted Sardinian to be compulsory in Sardinian schools, while 54.7% would prefer to see teaching in Sardinian as optional) and official bilingualism like in the Aosta Valley and South Tyrol (62.7% of the population were in favour, 25.9% said no and 11.4% were unsure). Such consensus remains relatively stable to this day; another survey, conducted in 2008, reported that more than half of the interviewees, 57.3%, were in favour of the introduction of Sardinian into schools alongside Italian. More research carried out in 2010 confirmed warm reception among the students' parents to introducing Sardinian at school, even though skepticism circulated around having it taught as the vehicular language of education.


title: Sardinian language

text: In the 1990s, there had been a resurgence of Sardinian-language music, ranging from the more traditional genres (, , etc.) to rock (, , , etc.) and even hip hop and rap ("Dr. Drer e CRC Posse", "Quilo", , "Malam", , "Menhir", "Stranos Elementos", "Malos Cantores", "Randagiu Sardu", "Futta" etc.), and with artists who used the language as a means to promote the island and address its long-standing issues and the new challenges. A few films (like "Su Re", "Bellas Mariposas", "Treulababbu", "Sonetaula" etc.) have also been dubbed in Sardinian, and some others were provided with subtitles in the language. The first scientific work in Sardinian (), delving into the question of modern energy supplies, was written by Paolo Giuseppe Mura, Physics Professor at the University of Cagliari, in 1995.


title: Sardinian language

text: Eventually, sustained activism made possible the ratification by Italy of the European Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in 1998, which would be followed in 1999 by the formal recognition of twelve minority languages (Sardinian, Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovenian, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin and Occitan) through the framework law no. 482, in keeping with the spirit of Art. 6 of the Italian Constitution ("The Republic safeguards linguistic minorities by means of appropriate measures"). While the first section of said law states that Italian is the official language of the Republic, a number of provisions are included to normalize the use of such languages and let them become part of the national fabric. However, Italy (along with France and Malta) has never ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Nevertheless, the law proved to be a positive step towards the legalization of Sardinian as it put at least an end to the ban on the language which had been in effect since the Italian Unification, and was deemed as a starting point, albeit timid, to pursue a more decentralized school curriculum for the island.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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").


title: Sardinian language

text: Language use is far from stable; following the Expanded GIDS ("Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale") model, Sardinian would position between 7 ("Shifting: the child-bearing generation knows the language well enough to use it among themselves but none are transmitting it to their children") and 8a ("Moribund: the only remaining active speakers of the language are members of the grandparent generation"). While an estimated 68 percent of the islanders had in fact a good oral command of Sardinian, language ability among the children has plummeted to less than 13 percent; some linguists, like Mauro Maxia, cite the low number of Sardinian-speaking children (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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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", etc. The DuckDuckGo search engine is available in Sardinian as well. In 2016, the first automatic translation software from Italian to Sardinian was developed.


title: Sardinian language

text: In 2015, all the political parties in the Sardinian regional council reached an agreement concerning a series of amendments to the old 1997 law to be able to introduce the optional teaching of the language in Sardinia's schools. The Unified Text on the Discipline of the Regional linguistic policy was eventually approved on 27 June 2018, with the aim of setting in motion a path towards bilingual administration, contributions to bilingual mass media, publishing, IT schools and websites; it also allowed for the foundation of a Sardinian board ("Consulta de su Sardu") with thirty experts that would propose a linguistic standard based on the main historical varieties, and would also have advisory duties towards the Regional body. However, said law has yet to be followed up by the respective implementing decrees, the lack of which prevents it from being legally applicable. Some Sardinian language activists and activist groups have also contested the law itself, considering it a political attack on Sardinian made to try to negate its uniformity and to relegate it to folklore, and also noted how its text contains a few parts that could bring the Italian government to challenge it.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: At present, the Sardinian-speaking community is the least protected one in Italy, despite being the largest minority language group officially recognized by the state. In fact the language, which is receding in all domains of use, is still not given access to any field of public life, such as education (Italian–Sardinian bilingualism is still frowned upon, while the local public universities play little, if any, role whatsoever in supporting the language), politics (with the exception of some nationalist groups), justice, administrative authorities and public services, media, and cultural, ecclesiastical, economic and social activities, as well as facilities. 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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, less than 15 per cent of the Sardinian children use the language to communicate with each other. 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 Italianization 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. The 1995 Euromosaic project, which conducted a research study on the current situation of the ethno-linguitic minorities across Europe under the auspices of the European Commission, concludes their report on Sardinian as follows:


title: Sardinian language

text: As Matteo Valdes explains, "the island's population sees, day after day, the decline of their original languages. They are complicit in this decline, passing on to their children the language of prestige and power, but at the same time they feel that the loss of local languages is also a loss of themselves, of their history, of their own specific identity or distinctiveness".


title: Sardinian language

text: 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 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. In fact, compared to a now prevalent regional Italian that, according to Bolognesi, "is in fact a hybrid language that has arisen from the contact between two different linguistic systems", "the (little) Sardinian which is used by young people often constitutes an ungrammatical jargon filled with obscenities and constructions belonging to Italian": in other words, the population would therefore only master "two crippled languages" () whose manifestations do not arise from a recognisable norm, nor do they constitute a clear source of linguistic security. Bolognesi believes therefore that the Sardinians' utter "rejection of their original linguistic identity has not entailed the hoped-for and automatic homologation to a more socially prestigious identity, but the acquisition of a second-class identity (neither truly Sardinian nor truly Italian), no longer self-centred but rather peripheral with respect to the sources of linguistic and cultural norms, which still remain beyond their reach: on the other side of the Tyrrhenian Sea”.


title: Sardinian language

text: By contrast, Eduardo Blasco Ferrer has been noted how the Sardinian-speaking community engages only in code-switching and usually takes care in refraining from code-mixing between the two different languages.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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.


title: Sardinian language

text: In conclusion, the Sardinian language, while still being described as "viable" in 2003, continues to be adversely affected by pervasive and all-encompassing Italianization 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 Italianization; 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, and even today's cohort of older Sardinian speakers is unable to carry on an entire conversation in Sardinian as their knowledge of it gets increasingly fragmented. As of now, Sardinian seems to be viewed by the islanders as an instrument for the reappropriation of their past, rather than for its use as a means of communication for the present and future.


title: Sardinian language

text: 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: