page_title: Sardinian language
section_title: Present situation
hierarchical_section_title: Sardinian language / Present situation
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Cartello bilingue Italiano-Sardo, posto nel municipio del comune di Villasor, recante la scritta "Ufficio Tecnico" in italiano e "Ufitziu Tènnicu" in sardo. Sono presenti inoltre lo stemma del comune di Villasor e della Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, con relative didascalie bilingue.
context_page_description: Sardinian or Sard is a Romance language spoken by the Sardinians on the Western Mediterranean island of Sardinia.
  Many Romance linguists consider it the language that, together with Italian, is closest to Latin among all the genealogical descendants of Latin. However, it has also incorporated elements of a Pre-Latin substratum, as well as a Byzantine Greek, Catalan, Spanish and Italian superstratum. These elements of the language originate in the political history of the island of Sardinia: 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 18th century onward, under the Italian one.
  In 1997, Sardinian, along with other languages spoken on the island, was recognized by regional law as an official language of Sardinia, and in 1999, Sardinian and eleven other minoranze linguistiche storiche were similarly recognized by national law. Among these, Sardinian is notable as having the largest number of speakers.
context_section_description: 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 much later than in other European peripheries marked by the long-standing presence of ethno-linguistic minorities; Sardinian was in fact dismissed by the already Italianized 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 modernist stance on Sardinia's path to development, believed in fact that the latter had been held back by the islanders' "traditional practices", and that social and cultural progress could only be brought about through their rejection. Consequently, the Sardinians have been encouraged to italianize and thus part with what they believed to be negatively marking their affiliation with a stigmatized identity.
  At the time of drafting of the statute in 1948, the legislator eventually decided to specify the "Sardinian specialty" as a single criterion for political autonomy just on the grounds of a couple of socio-economic issues devoid of considerations of a distinct cultural, historical and geographical identity, which were on the contrary looked down upon as a potential prelude to more autonomist or separatist claims. Eventually, the special statute of 1948 did not recognize any special geographical conditions about the region nor made any mention of a distinct cultural and linguistic element, preferring instead to concentrate on state-funded plans (baptised with the Italian name of piani di rinascita) for the heavy industrial development of the island, as well as the military installations. Therefore, far from being a Statute grounded on the acknowledgment of a particular cultural identity like, for example, in South Tyrol, what emerged in Sardinia was an «autonomism 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 on the terms of social backwardness and economic deprivation». In the meantime, the emphasis on Italian-only assimilation policies continued, with historical sites and ordinary objects renamed in Italian (e.g. the various kinds of cheese, zippole instead of tzipulas, carta da musica instead of carasau, formaggelle instead of pardulas / casadinas, etc.). The Ministry of Public Education reportedly requested that the teachers willing to teach Sardinian be put under surveillance. The rejection of the indigenous language, along with a rigid model of Italian-language education, corporal punishment and shaming, has led to poor schooling for the Sardinians.
  There have been campaigns, often expressed in the form of political demands from the late '60s onwards, to give Sardinian equal status with Italian as a means to promote cultural identity. One of the first demands was 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 ethno-linguistic minority and Sardinian as the island's co-official language. Critical acclaim in Sardinian cultural circles followed the patriotic poem No sias isciau ("Don't be a slave") by Raimondo (Remundu) Piras some months before his death in 1977, urging bilingual education to reverse the ongoing trend of de-sardization. It was in the late 70s that a significant shift to Italian was first noted not only in the Campidanian plains, 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 minori
caption: A bilingual sign in Villasor's town hall.
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