Sardinian language
Sardinian or Sard 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. 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 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. 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 were similarly recognized as such by national law. Among these, Sardinian is notable as having, in terms of absolute numbers, the largest community of speakers.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, 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 use in the family, cultural reproduction, use in the community, prestige, use in institutions, use in education".
As the Sardinians have almost been 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, 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".
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 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, 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; its substratum 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 : 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.
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 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. J. N. Adams is of the opinion that similarities in many words, such as acina, pala and spanu, 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 ía de sa báza, also recurs in the Berber languages.
To most Italians Sardinian is unintelligible, reminding them of Spanish, because of the way in which the language is acoustically articulated; characterized as it is by a sharply outlined physiognomy which is displayed from the earliest sources available, it is in fact considered a distinct language, if not an altogether different branch, among the Romance idioms; George Bossong summarises thus: "be this as it may, from a strictly linguistic point of view there can be no doubt that Sardinian is to be classified as an independent Romance language, or even as an independent branch inside the family, and so it is classed alongside the great national languages like French and Italian in all modern manuals of Romance linguistics".
History
Sardinia's relative isolation from mainland Europe encouraged the development of a Romance language that preserves traces of its indigenous, pre-Roman language. The language is posited to have substratal influences from Paleo-Sardinian, which some scholars have linked to Basque and Etruscan; comparisons have also been drawn with the Berber languages from North Africa to shed more light on the language spoken in Sardinia prior to its Romanization. Subsequent adstratal influences include Catalan, Spanish, and Italian. The situation of the Sardinian language with regard to the politically dominant ones did not change until fascism and, most evidently, the 1950s.Origins of modern Sardinian
;Prenuragic and Nuragic eraThe origins of ancient Sardinian, also known as Paleo-Sardinian, are currently unknown. Research has attempted to discover obscure, indigenous, pre-Romance roots. The root srd, indicating many place names as well as the island's people, is reportedly either associated with or originating from the Sherden, one of the Sea Peoples. Other sources trace instead the root srd from Σαρδώ, a legendary woman from the Anatolian Kingdom of Lydia, or from the Libyan mythological figure of the Sardus Pater Babai.
In 1984, Massimo Pittau claimed to have found the etymology of many Latin words in the Etruscan language, after comparing it with the Nuragic language. Etruscan elements, formerly thought to have originated in Latin, would indicate a connection between the ancient Sardinian culture and the Etruscans. According to Pittau, the Etruscan and Nuragic language are descended from Lydian as a consequence of contact with Etruscans and other Tyrrhenians from Sardis as described by Herodotus. Although Pittau suggests that the Tirrenii landed in Sardinia and the Etruscans landed in modern Tuscany, his views are not shared by most Etruscologists.
According to Bertoldi and Terracini, Paleo-Sardinian has similarities with the Iberic languages and Siculian; for example, the suffix -ara in proparoxytones indicated the plural. Terracini proposed the same for suffixes in -', -', -', -' + ' + a paragogic vowel. Rohlfs, Butler and Craddock add the suffix -' as a unique element of Paleo-Sardinian. Suffixes in /a, e, o, u/ + -rr- found a correspondence in north Africa, in Iberia and in southern Italy and Gascony, with a closer relationship to Basque. However, these early links to a Basque precursor have been questioned by some Basque linguists. According to Terracini, suffixes in -', -', -', and -' are common to Paleo-Sardinian and northern African languages. Pittau emphasized that this concerns terms originally ending in an accented vowel, with an attached paragogic vowel; the suffix resisted Latinization in some place names, which show a Latin body and a Nuragic suffix. According to Bertoldi, some toponyms ending in -' and -' indicated an Anatolian influence. The suffix -', widely used in Iberia and possibly of Celtic origin, and the ethnic suffix in -' and - have also been noted as Paleo-Sardinian elements.
Some linguists, like Max Leopold Wagner, Blasco Ferrer and Arregi have attempted to revive a theoretical connection with Basque by linking words such as Sardinian idile and Basque itil ; Sardinian ospile and Basque hozpil ; Sardinian arrotzeri and Basque arrotz ; Sardinian golostiu and Basque gorosti ; Gallurese zerru and Basque zerri. Genetic data have found the Basques to be close to the Sardinians.
Since the Neolithic period, some degree of variance across the island's regions is also attested. The Arzachena culture, for instance, suggests a link between the northernmost Sardinian region and southern Corsica that finds further confirmation in the Natural History by Pliny the Elder. There are also some stylistic differences across Northern and Southern Nuragic Sardinia, which may indicate the existence of two other tribal groups mentioned by the same Roman author. According to the archeologist Giovanni Ugas, these tribes may have in fact played a role in shaping the current regional linguistic differences of the island.
;Classical period
Around the 10th and 9th century BC, Phoenician merchants were known to have made their presence in Sardinia, which acted as a geographical mediator in between the Iberian and the Italian peninsula. In the eighth and seventh centuries, the Phoenicians began to develop permanent settlements, politically arranged as city-states in similar fashion to the Lebanese coastal areas. It did not take long before they started gravitating around the Carthaginian sphere of influence, whose level of prosperity spurred Carthage to send a series of expeditionary forces to the island; although they were initially repelled by the natives, the North African city vigorously pursued a policy of active imperialism and, by the sixth century, managed to establish its political hegemony and military control over South-Western Sardinia. Punic began to be spoken in the area, and many words entered ancient Sardinian as well. Words like giara 'plateau', guspinu 'nasturtium', curma 'fringed rue', mítza 'spring', síntziri 'marsh horsetail', tzeúrra 'sprout', tzichirìa 'dill' and tzípiri 'rosemary' are commonly used, especially in the modern Sardinian varieties of the Campidanese plain, while proceeding northwards the influence is more limited to place names, such as the town of Magomadas, Macumadas in Nuoro or Magumadas in Gesico and Nureci, all of which deriving from the Punic maqom hadash.
The Roman domination began in 238 BC, but was often contested by the local Sardinian tribes, who had by then acquired a high level of political organization, and would manage to only partly supplant the pre-Latin Sardinian languages, including Punic. Although the colonists and negotiatores of strictly Italic descent would later play a relevant role in introducing and spreading Latin to Sardinia, Romanisation proved slow to take hold among the Sardinian natives, whose proximity to the Carthaginian cultural influence was noted by Roman authors. Punic continued to be spoken well into the 3rd–4th century AD, as attested by votive inscriptions, and it is thought that the natives from the most interior areas, led by the tribal chief Hospito, joined their brethren in making the switch to Latin around the 7th century AD, through their conversion to Christianity. Cicero, who loathed the Sardinians on the ground of numerous factors, such as their outlandish language, their kinship with Carthage and their refusal to engage with Rome, would call the Sardinian rebels latrones mastrucati or Afri to emphasize Roman superiority over a population mocked as the refuse of Carthage.
A number of obscure Nuragic roots remained unchanged, and in many cases Latin accepted the local roots. Barbagia, the mountainous central region of the island, derives its name from the Latin Barbaria, because its people refused cultural and linguistic assimilation for a long time: 50% of toponyms of central Sardinia, particularly in the territory of Olzai, are actually not related to any known language. According to Terracini, amongst the regions in Europe that went on to draw their language from Latin, Sardinia has overall preserved the highest proportion of pre-Latin toponyms. Besides the place names, on the island there are still a few names of plants, animals and geological formations directly traceable to the ancient Nuragic era.
By the end of the Roman domination, Latin had gradually become however the speech of most of the island's inhabitants. As a result of this protracted and prolonged process of Romanisation, the modern Sardinian language is today classified as Romance or neo-Latin, with some phonetic features resembling Old Latin. Some linguists assert that modern Sardinian, being part of the Island Romance group, was the first language to split off from Latin, all others evolving from Latin as Continental Romance. In fact, contact with Rome might have ceased from as early as the first century BC. In terms of vocabulary, Sardinian retains an array of peculiar Latin-based forms that are either unfamiliar to, or have altogether disappeared in, the rest of the Romance-speaking world.
The number of Latin inscriptions on the island is relatively small and fragmented. Some engraved poems in ancient Greek and Latin are seen in the so-called "Viper's Cave", a burial monument built in Caralis by Lucius Cassius Philippus in remembrance of his dead spouse Atilia Pomptilla; we also have some religious works by Eusebius and Saint Lucifer, both from Caralis and in the writing style of whom may be noted the lexicon and perifrastic forms typical of Sardinian.
After a period of 80 years under the Vandals, Sardinia would again be part of the Byzantine Empire under the Exarchate of Africa for almost another five centuries. Luigi Pinelli believes that the Vandal presence had "estranged Sardinia from Europe, linking its own destiny to Africa's territorial expanse" in a bond that was to strengthen further "under Byzantine rule, not only because the Roman Empire included the island in the African Exarchate, but also because it developed from there, albeit indirectly, its ethnic community, causing it to acquire many of the African characteristics" that would allow ethnologists and historians to elaborate the theory of the Paleo-Sardinians' supposed African origin, now disproved. Casula is convinced that the Vandal domination caused a "clear breaking with the Roman-Latin writing tradition or, at the very least, an appreciable bottleneck" so that the subsequent Byzantine government was able to establish "its own operational institutions" in a "territory disputed between the Greek- and the Latin-speaking world".
Despite a period of almost five centuries, the Greek language only lent Sardinian a few ritual and formal expressions using Greek structure and, sometimes, the Greek alphabet. Evidence for this is found in the condaghes, the first written documents in Sardinian. From the long Byzantine era there are only a few entries but they already provide a glimpse of the sociolinguistical situation on the island in which, in addition to the community's everyday Neo-Latin language, Greek was also spoken by the ruling classes. Some toponyms, such as Jerzu, together with the personal names Mikhaleis, Konstantine and Basilis, demonstrate Greek influence.