Sardinian or Sard( , , , , or , ) is a Romance language spoken by the Sardinians on the Italian Mediterranean island of Sardinia.
The distinctive character of the Sardinian language among the Romance languages has long been known among linguists. ("The most characteristic of the Neo-Latin languages, by far more characteristic than Ladin or Franco-Provençal.") ("From G. I. Ascoli onwards, all linguists agree in giving Sardinian a special place among the neo-Latin languages because of the various characteristics that distinguish it not only from the Italian dialects, but also from the other languages of the Romance family, and that appear as much in its phonetics as in its morphology and lexicon.") Almagia, Roberto; Cortesi, Fabrizio; Salfi, Mario; Sera, Gioacchino; Taramelli, Antonio; Momigliano, Arnaldo; Ciasca, Raffaele; Bottiglioni, Gino; Garzia, Raffa; Gabriel, Gavino; Brunelli, Enrico; Vardabasso, Silvio (1936). "Sardegna". Enciclopedia Italiana. Treccani, "Parlari". Lai, Rosangela. 2018. "Language Planning and Language Policy in Sardinia". Language Problems & Language Planning. 42(1): 70–88. . . pp. 70–71 Many Romance linguists consider it, together with Italian, as the language that is the closest to Latin among all of Latin's descendants. However, it has also incorporated elements of Pre-Latin (mostly Paleo-Sardinian and, to a much lesser degree, Punic) substratum, as well as a Byzantine Greek, Catalan, Spanish, French, and Italian superstratum. These elements originate in the political history of Sardinia, whose indigenous society experienced competition and, at times, conflict with a series of colonizing newcomers.
Following the end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, Sardinia passed through periods of successive control by the Vandals, Byzantines, local Judicates, the Kingdom of Aragon, the Savoyard state, and finally Italy. These regimes varied in their usage of Sardinian as against other languages. For example, under the Judicates, Sardinian was used in administrative documents. Under Aragonese control, Catalan and Castilian became the island's prestige languages, and would remain so well into the 18th century.Mereu, D. (2020). "Cagliari Sardinian". Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 50(3), 389–405. . More recently, Italy's linguistic policies have encouraged diglossia, reducing the predominance of both Sardinian and Catalan.
Information about control and usage
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. 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).L'UNESCO e la diversità linguistica. Il caso dell'Italia Among these, Sardinian is notable as having, in terms of absolute numbers, the largest community of speakers."With some 1,6 million speakers, Sardinia is the largest minority language in Italy. Sardinians form an ethnic minority since they show a strong awareness of being an indigenous group with a language and a culture of their own. Although Sardinian appears to be recessive in use, it is still spoken and understood by a majority of the population on the island." "Nel 1948 la Sardegna diventa, anche per le sue peculiarità linguistiche, Regione Autonoma a statuto speciale. Tuttavia a livello politico, ufficiale, non cambia molto per la minoranza linguistica sarda, che, con circa 1,2 milioni di parlanti, è la più numerosa tra tutte le comunità alloglotte esistenti sul territorio italiano." "Sebbene in continua diminuzione, i sardi costituiscono tuttora la più grossa minoranza linguistica dello stato italiano con ca. 1.000.000 di parlanti stimati (erano 1.269.000 secondo le stime basate sul censimento del 2001)".
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 today primarily uses Italian, and less than 15 percent of the younger generations were reported to have been passed down some residual Sardinian,La Nuova Sardegna, 04/11/10, Per salvare i segni dell'identità – di Paolo Coretti usually in a deteriorated form described by linguist Roberto Bolognesi as "an ungrammatical slang".
The rather fragile and precarious state in which the Sardinian language now finds itself, where its use has been discouraged and consequently reduced even within the family sphere, is illustrated by the Euromosaic report, in which Sardinian "is in 43rd place in the ranking of the 50 languages taken into consideration and of which were analysed (a) use in the family, (b) cultural reproduction, (c) use in the community, (d) prestige, (e) use in institutions, (f) use in education".
As the Sardinians have been almost completely assimilated into the Italian national mores, including in terms of onomastics, and therefore now only happen to keep but a scant and fragmentary knowledge of their native and once first spoken language, limited in both scope and frequency of use, To access the data, click on List by languages, Sardinian, then scroll to "Sardinian language use survey". Sardinian has been classified by UNESCO as "definitely endangered". In fact, the intergenerational chain of transmission appears to have been broken since at least the 1960s, in such a way that the younger generations, who are predominantly Italian monolinguals, do not identify themselves with the indigenous tongue, which is now reduced to the memory of "little more than the language of their grandparents".Lai, Rosangela. 2018. "Language Planning and Language Policy in Sardinia". Language Problems & Language Planning. 42(1): 70–88. ISSN: 0272-2690, E-ISSN: 1569-9889 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.00012.lai, p. 73
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"If present trends continue, it is possible that within a few generations the regional variety of Italian will supplant Sardinian as the popular idiom and that linguists of the future will be obliged to refer to Sardinian only as a substratal influence which has shaped a regional dialect of Italian rather than as a living language descended directly from Latin." that, assuming the continuation of present trends to language death, it was possible that there would not be a Sardinian language of which to speak in the future, being referred to by linguists as the mere substratum of the now-prevailing idiom, i.e. Italian articulated in its own Sardinian-influenced variety,"il sardo continua ad agire anche nelle menti dei sardi che il sardo non lo conoscono né lo parlano, che non l'hanno mai appreso e imparato; il sardo agisce se non altro nelle strutture linguistiche d'ogni livello dell'italiano regionale di Sardegna, che è il codice usato dai più (agisce nella fonetica, nella sintassi e in ampi settori del lessico)..." Virdis, Maurizio (2003). La lingua sarda oggi: bilinguismo, problemi di identità culturale e realtà scolastica, cit. in Convegno dalla lingua materna al plurilinguismo, Gorizia, 6. which may come to wholly supplant the islanders' once living native tongue.
Overview
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;"Sardinian is an insular language par excellence: it is at once the most archaic and the most individual among the Romance group." its substratum (Paleo-Sardinian or Nuragic) has also been researched. In the first written testimonies, dating to the eleventh century, Sardinian appears as a language already distinct from the dialects of Italy.
A 1949 study by the Italian-American linguist Mario Pei, analyzing the degree to which seven Romance languages diverged from Classical Latin with respect to their accent vocalization, yielded the following measurements of divergence (with higher percentages indicating greater divergence from the stressed vowels of Classical Latin): Logudorese Sardinian 8%, Italian 12%, Spanish 20%, Romanian 23.5%, Occitan 25%, Portuguese 31%, and French 44%. The study emphasized, however, that it represented only "a very elementary, incomplete and tentative demonstration" of how statistical methods could measure linguistic change, assigned "frankly arbitrary" point values to various types of change, and did not compare languages in the sample with respect to any characteristics or forms of divergence other than stressed vowels, among other caveats.
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."Il fondo della lingua sarda di oggi è il latino. La Sardegna è il solo paese del mondo in cui la lingua dei Romani si sia conservata come lingua viva. Questa circostanza ha molto facilitato le mie ricerche nell'isola, perché almeno la metà dei pastori e dei contadini non conoscono l'italiano."
Although its lexical base is mostly of Latin origin, Sardinian nonetheless retains a number of traces of the linguistic substratum predating the Roman conquest of the island: several words and especially toponyms stem from Paleo-Sardinian"Prima di tutto, la neonata lingua sarda ingloba un consistente numero di termini e di cadenze provenienti da una lingua originaria preromana, che potremmo chiamare "nuragica"." and, to a lesser extent, Phoenician-Punic. These etyma might refer to an early Mediterranean substratum, which reveal close relations with Basque.
In addition to the aforementioned substratum, linguists such as Max Leopold Wagner and Benvenuto Aronne Terracini trace much of the distinctive Latin character of Sardinia to the languoids once spoken by the Christian and Jewish Berbers in North Africa, known as African Romance. Indeed, Sardinian was perceived as rather similar to African Latin when the latter was still in use, giving credit to the theory that vulgar Latin in both Africa and Sardinia displayed a significant wealth of parallelisms.Paolo Pompilio (1455–91): "" ("where villagers speak an almost intact Latin and, when Latin words are corrupted, then they pass to the sound and habits of the Sardinian language, which, as I myself know, also comes from Latin")". Quoted in Loporcaro, Michele (2015). Vowel Length from Latin to Romance, Oxford University Press, p. 48 J. N. Adams is of the opinion that similarities in many words, such as (), () and ('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 (, ) also recurs in the Berber languages."Wagner prospetta l'ipotesi che la denominazione sarda, identica a quella berbera, sia una reminiscenza atavica di lontane tradizioni comuni e così commenta (p. 277): "Parlando delle sopravvivenze celtiche, dice il Bertoldi: "Come nell'Irlanda odierna, anche nella Gallia antica una maggiore cedevolezza della "materia" linguistica, suoni e forme, rispetto allo "spirito" che resiste più tenace". Questo vale forse anche per la Sardegna; antichissime usanze, superstizioni, leggende si mantengono più saldamente che non i fugaci fenomeni linguistici"."