page_title: Sardinia
section_title: Languages
hierarchical_section_title: Sardinia / Culture / Languages
caption_attribution_description: English: The sign at the entrance of Pozzomaggiore in Sardinia (Italy) Italiano: Il cartello all'entrata di Pozzomaggiore in Sardegna
context_page_description: Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, and one of the 20 regions of Italy. It is located west of the Italian Peninsula, north of Tunisia and immediately south of the French island of Corsica.
  It is one of the five Italian regions that have been granted some degree of domestic autonomy by special statute. Its official name is Regione Autonoma della Sardegna. It is divided into four provinces and a metropolitan city. The capital of the region of Sardinia — and its largest city — is Cagliari. Sardinia's indigenous language and the other minority languages spoken on the island are officially recognized by the regional law as having "equal dignity" with Italian.
  Sardinia has been inhabited since the Paleolithic. The island's most iconic civilization is the indigenous Nuragic, which flourished from the 18th century BC to either 238 BC or the 2nd century AD in some parts of the island, and to the 6th century AD in that part of the island known as Barbagia.
context_section_description: Italian, which is the official language throughout Italy, is the most widely spoken language today, followed by the island's historical language, Sardinian (sardu).
  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 ethnolinguistc 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.
  Sassarese (sassaresu) and Gallurese (gadduresu) are classified as Corso-Sardinian languages, therefore more akin to the Italo-Dalmatian branch than to the Sardinian one, and are spoken in the north.
  In Sardinia there are examples of language islands: Algherese (alguerés) is a dialect of Catalan spoken in the city of Alghero; on the islands of San Pietro and Sant'Antioco, located in the extreme south west of Sardinia, the local population speaks a variant of Ligurian called Tabarchino (tabarchin); fewer and fewer people speak Venetian, Friulian and Istriot in Arborea and Fertilia, since these villages have been populated in the 1920s and 1930s by mainland colonists who came from northeastern Italy, and families from Istria and Dalmatia immediately after World War II.
  Due to the Italian assimilation policies carried out since 1760 and the ongoing absorption into the Italian culture, over the course of time the once prevalent indigenous languages have been increasingly losing ground to Italian and the process of ongoing language shift has led to their extreme endangerment. In fact, according to the data published by ISTAT in 2006, 52.5% of the Sardinian population speaks just Italian in the family environment, while 29.3% alternates Italian and Sardinian and only 16.6% uses Sardinian or other non-Italian languages; outside the circle of family and friends, the last option drops to 5.2%. The resulting Italianization has produced a new non-standard variety of the now majority language: regional Italian of Sardinia (IRS).
  Following the recent growth of the foreign-born population, the presence of other languages, principally Romanian, Arabic, Wolof and Chinese, is also expanding in some urban areas.
caption: A bilingual road sign in Italian and Sardinian at Pozzomaggiore.
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