Sardinian is a distinct branch of the Romance language family, going either by the same name or by Southern Romance: it is therefore a separate language rather than an Italian dialect, and it is also closer to its Latin roots than Italian itself. Sardinian has been formally recognized as one of Italy's twelve historical ethnolinguistic minorities since 1997, by regional and Italian law. The language has been influenced by Catalan, Spanish and recently Italian, while the once spoken Nuragic contributes many features to it in many ancient remnants. In 2006 the regional administration has approved the use of a single standardised writing system, the so-called "Limba Sarda Comuna", in official acts. As a literary language, Sardinian is gaining importance, despite heated debate about the lack of a commonly acknowledged standard orthography and controversial proposed solutions to this problem. The two main orthographies of the language are in fact Campidanese ("sardu campidanesu"), used in central southern Sardinia, and Logudorese ("sardu logudoresu"), extending northwards almost to the suburbs of Sassari. The Sardinian language is quite different from the other Romance languages and is homogeneous in terms of morphology, syntax and lexicon, but it also shows a spectrum of variation in terms of phonetics between the Northern and the Southern dialects.