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The emphasis on monolingual (Italian-only) policies and assimilation has continued after World War II, with historical sites and ordinary objects renamed in Italian.[1] The Ministry of Public Education reportedly requested the monitoring of Sardinian teachers.[2] The rejection of the indigenous language, along with a rigid model of Italian-language education,[3] led to the difficult scholarization of Sardinians. Even now, Sardinia currently has the highest rate of school and university drop-out in Italy.[4]
During the 1990s, Sardinian, Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovenian, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin and Occitan were recognized as minority languages by Law 482-1999.[5] Nevertheless, in many Italian libraries and universities books about the Sardinian language are still classified as Linguistica italiana (Italian linguistics), Dialetti italiani (Italian dialects) or Dialettologia italiana (Italian dialectology),[6][7] because Sardinian is considered an "Italian dialect" by some[8] (even at the institutional level).[9] The language has been stigmatized as indicative of a lack of education,[10][11] and as a result it is associated still by many locals with shame, backwardness and provincialism.
Despite campaigns to give Sardinian equal status with Italian as a means to promote cultural identity, a number of factors like immigration from mainland Italy, the interior rural exodus to urban areas[12] and the use of Italian as a prerequisite for jobs and social advancement actually hinder any policy set up to promote the language.[13][14][15] Therefore, UNESCO classifies Sardinian as "definitely endangered", because "many children learn the language, but some of them cease to use it throughout the school years".[16]
At present, language use is far from stable:[17] reports show that, while an estimated 68 percent of the islanders have a good oral command of Sardinian, language ability among the children drops to around 13 percent;[18][19] some linguists cite the low number of Sardinian-speaking children as indicative of language decline.[20] Instead, most of the younger generation, although they do understand some Sardinian, is actually monolingual and speaks a mixture of Italian and Sardinian (considered regional Italian by linguists[17]) that is called italiànu porcheddìnu ("piggy Italian", meaning more or less "broken Italian") by native Sardinian speakers.[21] Today, people who speak Sardinian on an everyday basis mainly live in the sparsely populated interior of the island, like the Barbagia region.[22][23]
A bill proposed by former prime minister Mario Monti's cabinet would have lowered Sardinian's protection level,[24] distinguishing between languages protected by international agreements (German, Slovenian, French and Ladin) and indigenous languages. This bill, which was not implemented (Italy has signed, but not ratified, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages),[25][26] triggered a reaction on the island.[27][28][29][30] Students have expressed an interest in taking all (or part) of their exit examinations in Sardinian.[31][32][33][34][35][36][37]
In response to a 2013 Italian initiative to remove bilingual signs, 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.[38][39][40] After a signature campaign,[41] it has been made possible to change the language setting on Facebook from any language to Sardinian.[42][43]
In 2015, all the political parties in the Sardinian regional council have reached an agreement involving a series of amendments to the old 1997 law in order to introduce the optional teaching of the language in Sardinia's schools. The law, if approved, will be implemented the same year.[44][45][46] Although there is still not an option to teach Sardinian on the island itself, let alone in Italy, some language courses are instead available in Germany (Universities of Stuttgart, Munich and Tübingen), Spain (University of Girona)[47] and Czech Republic (Brno university).[48][49] Shigeaki Sugeta also taught Sardinian to his students of Romance languages at the Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.[50][51][52]
At the present day, the Sardinian-speaking community, despite being the largest minority language group recognised by Italy,[53] is also the least protected one. In fact the language, which is slowly receding in all domains of use, is still not given access to any field of public life, such as education (the use of Sardinian in schools is still discouraged,[20][54] while the local universities do not provide any support in the language[55][56]), politics (with the exception of some nationalist groups), justice, administrative authorities and public services, media,[57][58][59] and cultural,[60] ecclesiastical,[61] economic and social activities, as well as facilities. A solution to the Sardinian question is unlikely to be found anytime soon.[17]
All dialects of Sardinian have phonetic features that are archaic relative to other Romance languages. The degree of archaism varies, with the dialect spoken in the Province of Nuoro being considered the most conservative. Medieval evidence indicates that the language spoken on Sardinia and Corsica at the time was similar to modern Nuorese Sardinian. The remaining dialects are thought to have innovated as the result of Tuscan (later Italian) and Spanish influences.
The examples listed below are from the Logudorese dialect:
Sardinian contains the following phonetic innovations:
Although the latter two features were acquired during Spanish rule, the others indicate a deeper relationship between ancient Sardinia and the Iberian world; the retroflex d, l and r are found in southern Italy, Tuscany and Asturias, and were probably involved in the palatalization process of the Latin clusters -ll-, pl-, cl- (-ll- > Castilian and Catalan -ll- [ʎ], Gascon -th [c]; cl- > Galician-Portuguese ch- [tʃ], Ital. chi- [kj]).
According to Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, Sardinian has the following phonemes:
The five vowels /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/, without length differentiation.
Bilabial | Labio- dental |
Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | m /m/ | n /n/ | gn /ɲ/ | |||||
Plosive | p /p/ b /b/ | t /t/ d /d/ | dd /ɖ/ | k /k/ g /ɡ/ | ||||
Affricate | tz /ts/ z /dz/ | ch, c /tʃ/ g /dʒ/ | ||||||
Fricative | b /β/ | f /f/ v /v/ | (th /θ/) d /ð/ | s, ss /s/ s /z/ | sc /ʃ/ x /ʒ/ | g /ɣ/ | ||
Tap | r /ɾ/ | |||||||
Trill | rr /r/ | |||||||
Lateral | l /l/ | |||||||
Approximant | j /j/ |
There are three series of plosives or corresponding approximants:
In Cagliari and neighboring dialects, the soft [d] is assimilated to the rhotic consonant [ɾ]: digitus > didu = diru (finger).
Articulation point | labio-dental | dentoalveolar | retroflex | palatal | velar | from Latin |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
voiceless | p | t | k | double voiceless | ||
double voiced | bb | dd | ɖɖ | – | kw > bb, bd > dd, etc. | |
approximants | b [β] | d [ð] | ɡ [ɣ] | single stops |
The double-voiced retroflex stop /ɖɖ/ (written dd) derives from the former retroflex lateral approximant /ɭɭ/.
Some permutations of l and r are seen; in most dialects, a preconsonant l (for example, lt or lc) becomes r: Latin "altum" > artu, marralzu = marrarzu, "rock".
In palatal context, Latin l changed into [dz], [ts], [ldz] [ll] or [dʒ], rather than the [ʎ] of Italian: achizare (Italian accigliare), *volia > bòlla = bòlza = bòza, "wish" (Italian vòglia), folia > fogia = folla = foza, "leaf" (Italian foglia), filia > filla = fidza = fiza, "daughter" (Italian figlia).
Sardinian's distinctive features are:
Sardinia has historically had a small population scattered across isolated cantons. Its language is divided into two major dialects: Logudorese (su logudoresu), spoken in the north, and Campidanese (su campidanesu), spoken in the south. They differ primarily in phonetics, which does not hamper intelligibility. Logudorese is considered the more conservative dialect, with the Nuorese subdialect the most conservative. It has retained the classical Latin pronunciation of the stop velars (kena versus cena, "supper"), the front middle vowels (compare Campidanese iotacism, probably from Byzantine Greek)[62] and assimilation of close-mid vowels (cane versus cani, "dog" and gattos versus gattus, "cats"). Labio-velars become plain labials (limba versus lingua, "language" and abba versus acua, "water"). I is prosthesized before consonant clusters beginning in s (iscala versus Campidanese scala, "stairway" and iscola versus scola, "school").
An east-west strip of small villages in central Sardinia speaks a transitional dialect (Sardu de mesania) between Logudorese and Campidanese. Examples include is limbas (the languages) and is abbas (the waters). Campidanese is the dialect spoken in the southern half of Sardinia (including Cagliari, the metropolis of the Roman province), influenced by Rome, Carthage, Costantinople and Late Latin. Examples include is fruminis (the rivers) and is domus (the houses).
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