Sardinia's relative isolation from mainland Europe encouraged the development of a Romance language that preserves traces of its indigenous, pre-Roman language(s). 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(s) 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 era The origins of ancient Sardinian, also known as Paleo-Sardinian, are currently unknown. Research has attempted to discover obscure, indigenous, pre-Romance
roots. The root
s(a)rd, 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
s(a)rd from , a legendary woman from the
Anatolian
Kingdom of Lydia, or from the
Libyan mythological figure of the
Sardus Pater Babai ("Sardinian Father" or "Father of the Sardinians"). 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(s). 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 -'''' (for example, the Sardinian ) have also been noted as Paleo-Sardinian elements (Terracini, Ribezzo, Wagner, Hubschmid and Faust). Some linguists, like Max Leopold Wagner (1931), Blasco Ferrer (2009, 2010) and Arregi (2017) have attempted to revive a theoretical connection with Basque by linking words such as Sardinian and Basque ; Sardinian and Basque ; Sardinian and Basque ; Sardinian and Basque ; Gallurese (Corso-Sardinian) (with
z for ) and Basque (with
z for ).
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 (
Gallura) 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 (
Balares and
Ilienses) 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 'plateau' (cf.
Hebrew 'forest, scrub'), '
nasturtium' (from Punic ), '
fringed rue' (cf. Arabic '
Syrian rue'), 'spring' (cf. Hebrew , 'source, fountainhead'), '
marsh horsetail' (from Punic '
common knotgrass'), 'sprout' (from , diminutive of Punic 'seed'), '
dill' (from Punic ; cf. Hebrew 'ale') and '
rosemary' (from Punic ) 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, in
Nuoro or in
Gesico and
Nureci, all of which deriving from the Punic . 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 (businessmen) 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 () or () 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 (like
nur, presumably cognate of
Norax, which makes its appearance in
nuraghe,
Nurra,
Nurri and many other toponyms).
Barbagia, the mountainous central region of the island, derives its name from the Latin (a term meaning , similar in origin to the now antiquated word
Barbary), 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 (the two most prestigious languages in the
Roman Empire) are seen in the so-called "Viper's Cave" ( in Sardinian, in Italian, in Latin), a burial monument built in Caralis (
Cagliari) by Lucius Cassius Philippus (a Roman who had been exiled to Sardinia) 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 (e.g. in place of ; compare with Sardinian or ). 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 (thought to derive from the Greek , ), together with the personal names
Mikhaleis,
Konstantine and
Basilis, demonstrate Greek influence. As the Byzantines were fully focused on reconquering southern Italy and Sicily, which had in the meanwhile also
fallen to the Muslims, their attention on Sardinia was neglected and communications broke down with
Constantinople; this spurred the former Byzantine province of Sardinia to become progressively more autonomous from the Byzantine
oecumene, and eventually attain independence. Pinelli argues that "the Arab conquest of North Africa separated Sardinia from that continent without, however, causing the latter to rejoin Europe" and that this event "determined a capital turning point for Sardinia, giving rise to a
de facto independent national government". (University Public Library of Cagliari) Sardinian was the first Romance language of all to gain official status, being used by the four
Judicates, former Byzantine districts that became independent political entities after the
Arab expansion in the
Mediterranean had cut off any ties left between the island and
Byzantium. The exceptionality of the Sardinian situation, which in this sense constitutes a unique case throughout the Latin-speaking Europe, consists in the fact that any official text was written solely in Sardinian from the very beginning and completely excluded Latin, unlike what was happening – and would continue to happen – in France, Italy and Iberia at the same time; Latin, although co-official, was in fact used only in documents concerning external relations in which the Sardinian kings (, ) engaged. Awareness of the dignity of Sardinian for official purposes was such that, in the words of Livio Petrucci, a Neo-Latin language had come to be used "at a time when nothing similar can be observed in the Italian peninsula" not only "in the legal field" but also "in any other field of writing". A
diplomatic analysis of the earliest Sardinian documents shows that the Judicates provided themselves with
chanceries, which employed an indigenous diplomatic model for writing public documents; one of them, dating to 1102, displays text in
half-uncial, a script that had long fallen out of use on the European continent and F. Casula believes may have been adopted by the Sardinians of Latin culture as their own "national script" from the 8th until the 12th century, prior to their receiving outside influence from the arrival of mainly Italian notaries. Old Sardinian had a greater number of
archaisms and
Latinisms than the present language does, with few Germanic words, mostly coming from Latin itself, and even fewer Arabisms, which had been imported by scribes from Iberia; in spite of their best efforts with a score of expeditions to the island, from which they would get considerable booty and a hefty number of Sardinian slaves, the Arab assailants were in fact each time forcefully driven back and would never manage to conquer and settle on the island. Although the surviving texts come from such disparate areas as the north and the south of the island, Sardinian then presented itself in a rather homogeneous form: even though the orthographic differences between Logudorese and Campidanese Sardinian were beginning to appear, Wagner found in this period "the original unity of the Sardinian language". In agreement with Wagner is Paolo Merci, who found a "broad uniformity" around this period, as were Antonio Sanna and Ignazio Delogu too, for whom it was the islanders' community life that prevented Sardinian from localism. According to
Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, it was in the wake of the fall of the Judicates of
Cagliari and
Gallura, in the second half of the 13th century, that Sardinian began to fragment into its modern dialects, undergoing some Tuscanization under the rule of the
Republic of Pisa; it did not take long before the
Genoese too started carving their own sphere of influence in northern Sardinia, both through the mixed Sardinian-Genoese nobility of Sassari and the members of the Doria family. A certain range of dialectal variation is then noted. The Arborean judges' effort to unify the Sardinian dialects were due to their desire to be legitimate rulers of the entire island under a single state ( ); such political goal, after all, was already manifest in 1164, when the Arborean Judge
Barison ordered his great seal to be made with the writings () and ().
Dante Alighieri wrote in his 1302–1305 essay
De vulgari eloquentia that
Sardinians were strictly speaking not Italians (), even though they appeared superficially similar to them, and they did not speak anything close to a Neo-Latin language of their own (), but resorted to aping straightforward Latin instead. Dante's view on the Sardinians, however, is proof of how their language had been following its own course in a way which was already unintelligible to non-islanders, and had become, in Wagner's words, an impenetrable "sphinx" to their judgment. the Tuscan poet Fazio degli Uberti refers to the Sardinians in his poem as "" ("a people that no one is able to understand / nor do they come to a knowledge of what other peoples say about them"). According to Wagner, the close relationship in the development of Vulgar Latin between North Africa and Sardinia might not have only derived from ancient ethnic affinities between the two populations, but also from their common political past within the
Exarchate of Africa. from the 13th–14th centuries What literature is left to us from this period primarily consists of legal and administrative documents, besides the aforementioned and . The first document containing Sardinian elements is a 1063 donation to the
abbey of Montecassino signed by Barisone I of Torres. Another such document (the so-called
Carta Volgare) comes from the
Judicate of Cagliari and was issued by
Torchitorio I de Lacon-Gunale in around 1070, written in Sardinian whilst still employing the
Greek alphabet. Other documents are the 1080 "Logudorese Privilege", the 1089 Torchitorius' Donation (in the
Marseille archives), the 1190–1206 Marsellaise Chart (in Campidanese Sardinian) and an 1173 communication between the Bishop Bernardo of
Civita and Benedetto, who oversaw the Opera del Duomo in Pisa. The Statutes of Sassari (1316) and
Castelgenovese () are written in Logudorese Sardinian. The first
chronicle in , called , was published anonymously in the 13th century, relating the events of the
Judicate of Torres.
Iberian period – Catalan and Castilian influence The 1297
feoffment of Sardinia by
Pope Boniface VIII led to the creation of the
Kingdom of Sardinia: that is, of a state which, although lacking in , entered by right as a member in
personal union within the broader Mediterranean structure of the
Crown of Aragon, a
composite state. Thus began a long war between the latter and, to the cry of , from 1353, the previously allied
Judicate of Arborea, in which the Sardinian language was to play the role of an ethnic marker. The war had, among its motives, a never dormant and ancient Arborean political design to establish "a great island nation-state, wholly indigenous" which was assisted by the massive participation of the rest of the Sardinians, i.e. those not residing within the jurisdiction of Arborea (), as well as a widespread impatience with the foreign importation of a feudal regime, specifically "" and "", which threatened the survival of deep-rooted indigenous institutions and, far from ensuring the return of the island to a unitary regime, had only introduced there "" (), whereas instead "" (). The conflict between the two sovereign and warring parties, during which the Aragonese possessions making up the Kingdom of Sardinia were first administratively split into two separate "halves" () by
Peter IV the Ceremonious in 1355, ended after sixty-seven years with the Iberian
victory at Sanluri in 1409 and the renunciation of any succession right signed by
William II of Narbonne in 1420. This event marked the definitive end of Sardinian independence, whose historical relevance for the island, likened by Francesco C. Casula to "the
end of Aztec Mexico", should be considered "neither triumph nor defeat, but the painful birth of today's Sardinia". Any outbreak of anti-Aragonese rebellion, such as the revolt of
Alghero in 1353, that of
Uras in 1470 and finally that of
Macomer in 1478, celebrated in , were and would have been systematically neutralised. From that moment, "". Casula believes that the Aragonese winners from the brutal conflict would then move on to destroy the pre-existing documentary production of the still living Sardinian Judicate, which was predominantly written in Sardinian language along with other ones the chancery was engaged with, leaving behind their trail only "a few stones" and, overall, a "small group of documents", many of which are in fact still preserved and/or refer to archives outside the island. Specifically, the Arborean documents and the palace in which they were kept would be completely set on fire on May 21, 1478, as the viceroy triumphantly entered Oristano after having tamed the aforementioned 1478 rebellion, which threatened the revival of an Arborean identity which had been
de jure abolished in 1420 but was still very much alive in popular memory. Thereafter, the ruling class in Sardinia proceeded to adopt
Catalan as their primary language. The situation in
Cagliari, a city subject to Aragonese repopulation and where, according to
Giovanni Francesco Fara ( / ), for a time Catalan took over Sardinian as in
Alghero, was emblematic, so much so as to later generate
idioms such as () to indicate a person who could not express themselves "correctly".
Alghero is still a
Catalan-speaking enclave on Sardinia to this day. Nevertheless, the Sardinian language did not disappear from official use: the Catalan juridical tradition in the cities coexisted with that of the Sardinians, marked in 1421 by the Parliamentary extension of the Arborean to the feudal areas during the Reign of King
Alfonso the Magnanimous. Fara, in the same first modern monograph dedicated to Sardinia, reported the lively
multilingualism in "one and the same people", i.e. the Sardinians, because of immigration "by Spaniards and Italians" who came to the island to trade with the natives. Despite Catalan being widely spoken and written on the island at this time, leaving a lasting influence in Sardinia, Sardinian continued to be used in documents pertaining to the Kingdom's administrative and ecclesiastical spheres until the late 17th century. Religious orders also made use of the language. The regulations of the seminary of Alghero, issued by the bishop Andreas Baccallar on July 12, 1586, were in Sardinian; since they were directed to the entire
diocese of Alghero and Unions, the provisions intended for the direct knowledge of the people were written in Sardinian and Catalan. The earliest catechism to date found in from the post-Tridentine period is dated 1695, at the foot of the synodal constitutions of the
archbishopric of Cagliari. The sociolinguistic situation was characterised by the active and passive competence of the two Iberian languages in the cities and of Sardinian in the rest of the island, as reported in various contemporary testimonies: in 1561, the Portuguese
Jesuit Francisco Antonio estimated Sardinian to be «the ordinary language of Sardinia, as Italian is of Italy; in the cities of Cagliari and Alghero the ordinary language is Catalan, although there are many people who also use Sardinian». the ambassador and Martin Carillo (supposed author of the ironic judgment on the Sardinians' tribal and sectarian divisions: "" ) noted in 1611 that the main cities spoke Catalan and Spanish, but outside these cities no other language was understood than Sardinian, which in turn was understood by everyone in the entire Kingdom;); another testimony is offered by the rector of the Jesuit college of Sassari Baldassarre Pinyes who, in Rome, wrote: "As far as the Sardinian language is concerned, Your Paternity should know that it is not spoken in this city, nor in Alghero, nor in Cagliari: it is only spoken in the towns". The 16th century is marked by a new literary revival of Sardinian, starting from the 15th-century , written by Antòni Canu (1400–1476) and published in 1557. was aimed at "glorifying and enriching Sardinian, our language" () as the Spanish, French and Italian poets had already done for their own languages ( and ). This way, Araolla is one of the first Sardinian authors to bind the language to a Sardinian nation, the existence of which is not outright stated but naturally implied. Antonio Lo Frasso, a poet born in
Alghero (a city he remembered fondly) who spent his life in
Barcelona, wrote
lyric poetry in Sardinian. Agreeing with Fara's aforementioned , the Sardinian attorney Sigismondo Arquer, author of in
Sebastian Münster's
Cosmographia universalis (whose report would also be quoted in
Conrad Gessner's "On the different languages used by the various nations across the globe" with minor variations), stated that Sardinian prevailed in most of the Kingdom, with particular regard for the interior, while Catalan and Spanish were spoken in the cities, where the predominantly Iberian ruling class "occupies most of the official positions"; Especially through the reorganization of the monarchy led by the
Count-Duke of Olivares, Sardinia would gradually join a broad Spanish cultural sphere. Spanish was perceived as an elitist language, gaining solid ground among the ruling Sardinian class; Spanish had thus a profound influence on Sardinian, especially in those words, styles and cultural models owing to the prestigious international role of the
Habsburg monarchy as well as the
Court. according to Bruno Anatra's estimates, around 87% of the books printed in Cagliari were in Spanish. Nonetheless, the Sardinian language retained much of its importance, earning respect from the Spaniards in light of it being the ethnic code the people from most of the Kingdom kept using, especially in the rural areas. Sardinian endured, moreover, in religious drama and the drafting of notarial deeds in the interior. New genres of popular poetry were established around this period, like the or (sacred hymns), the (lullabies), the (funeral laments), the (
quatrains), the and (curses), and the improvised poetry of the and . Sardinian was also one of the few official languages, along with Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese, whose knowledge was required to be an officer in the
Spanish tercios, and, like Araolla before him, In this regard, the philologist Paolo Maninchedda argues that by doing so, these authors did not write "about Sardinia or in Sardinian to fit into an island system, but to inscribe Sardinia and its language – and with them, themselves – in a European system. Elevating Sardinia to a cultural dignity equal to that of other European countries also meant promoting the Sardinians, and in particular their educated countrymen, who felt that they had no roots and no place in the continental cultural system". (
Logudoro), wherein a total of 39 gravestones have writings in Sardinian and 3 in Italian
Savoyard period – Italian influence The
War of the Spanish Succession gave Sardinia to Austria, whose sovereignty was confirmed by the 1713–14 treaties of
Utrecht and
Rastatt. In 1717 a Spanish fleet
reoccupied Cagliari, and the following year Sardinia was ceded to
Victor Amadeus II of Savoy in exchange for Sicily. The Savoyard representative, the Count of Lucerna di Campiglione, received the definitive deed of cession from the Austrian delegate Don Giuseppe dei Medici, on condition that the "rights, statutes, privileges of the nation" that had been the subject of diplomatic negotiations were preserved. The island thus entered the Italian orbit after the Iberian one, although this transfer would not initially entail any social nor cultural and linguistic changes: Sardinia would still retain for a long time its Iberian character, so much so that only in 1767 were the Aragonese and Spanish dynastic symbols replaced by the Savoyard cross. Until 1848, the Kingdom of Sardinia would be a
composite state, and the island of Sardinia would remain a separate country with its own traditions and institutions, albeit without
summa potestas and in
personal union as an overseas possession of the
House of Savoy. Spanish, on the other hand, was the
prestige code known and used by the Sardinian social strata with at least some education, in so pervasive a manner that Joaquín Arce refers to it in terms of a paradox: Castilian had become the common language of the islanders by the time they officially ceased to be Spanish and, through their annexation by the House of Savoy, became Italian through Piedmont instead. Given the current situation, the Piedmontese ruling class which held the reins of the island, in this early phase, resolved to maintain its political and social institutions, while at the same time progressively hollowing them out as well as "treating the [Sardinian] followers of one faction and of the other equally, but keeping them divided in such a way as to prevent them from uniting, and for us to put to good use such rivalry when the occasion presents itself". According to Amos Cardia, this pragmatic stance was rooted in three political reasons: in the first place, the Savoyards did not want to rouse international suspicion and followed to the letter the rules dictated by the Treaty of London, signed on 2 August 1718, whereby they had committed themselves to respect the fundamental laws of the newly acquired Kingdom; in the second place, they did not want to antagonize the hispanophile locals, especially the elites; and finally, they lingered on hoping they could one day manage to dispose of Sardinia altogether, while still keeping the title of Kings by regaining Sicily. In fact, since imposing Italian would have violated one of the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, which the new rulers swore to observe upon taking on the mantle of King, Victor Amadeus II emphasised the need for the operation to be carried out through incremental steps, small enough to go relatively unnoticed (), as early as 1721. Such prudence was again noted, when the King claimed that he was nevertheless not intentioned to ban either Sardinian or Spanish on two separate occasions, in 1726 and 1728. The fact that the new masters of Sardinia felt at loss as to how they could better deal with a cultural and linguistic environment they perceived as alien to the Mainland, where Italian had long been the prestige and even official language, can be deduced from the study ("Account of the proposed ways to introduce the Italian language to this Kingdom") commissioned in 1726 by the Piedmontese administration, to which the Jesuit Antonio Falletti from
Barolo responded suggesting the ("to introduce an unknown language [Italian] through a known one [Spanish]") method as the best course of action for
Italianisation. In the same year, Victor Amadeus II had already said he could no longer tolerate the lack of ability to speak Italian on the part of the islanders, in view of the inconveniences that such inability was putting through for the functionaries sent from the Mainland. Restrictions to
mixed marriages between Sardinian women and the Piedmontese officers dispatched to the island, which had hitherto been prohibited by law, were at one point lifted and even encouraged so as to better introduce the language to the local population.
Eduardo Blasco Ferrer argues that, in contrast to the cultural dynamics long established in the Mainland between Italian and the various Romance dialects thereof, in Sardinia the relationship between the Italian language – recently introduced by Savoy – and the native one had been perceived from the start by the locals, educated and uneducated alike, as a relationship (albeit unequal in terms of political power and prestige) between two very different languages, and not between a language and one of its dialects. The plurisecular Iberian period had also contributed in making the Sardinians feel relatively detached from the Italian language and its cultural sphere; local sensibilities towards the language were further exacerbated by the fact that the Spanish ruling class had long considered Sardinian a distinct language, with respect to their own ones and Italian as well. The perception of the alterity of Sardinian was also widely shared among the Italians who happened to visit the island and recounted their experiences with the local population, whom they often likened to the Spanish and the ancient peoples of the Orient, an opinion illustrated by the Duke
Francis IV and
Antonio Bresciani; a popular assertion by the officer Giulio Bechi, who would participate in a military campaign against
Sardinian banditry dubbed as ("great hunt"), was that the islanders spoke "a horrible language, as intricate as Saracen, and sounding like Spanish". However, the Savoyard government eventually decided to directly introduce Italian altogether to Sardinia on the conventional date of 25 July 1760, because of the Savoyards' geopolitical need to draw the island away from Spain's gravitational pull and culturally integrate Sardinia into the orbit of the Italian peninsula, through the thorough assimilation of the island's cultural models, which were deemed by the Savoyard functionaries as "foreign" and "inferior", to Piedmont. In fact, the measure in question prohibited, among other things, "the unreserved use of the Castilian idiom in writing and speaking, which, after forty years of Italian rule, was still so deeply rooted in the hearts of the Sardinian teachers". In 1764, the exclusive imposition of the Italian language was finally extended to all sectors of public life, including education, in parallel with the reorganisation of the
Universities of Cagliari and
Sassari, which saw the arrival of personnel from the Italian mainland, and the reorganisation of lower education, where it was decided likewise to send teachers from Piedmont to make up for the lack of Italian-speaking Sardinian teachers. In 1763, it had already been planned to "send a number of skilled Italian professors" to Sardinia to "rid the Sardinian teachers of their errors" and "steer them along the right path". Spanish was replaced as the official language, even though Italian struggled to take roots for a long time: Milà i Fontanals wrote in 1863 that Catalan had been used in notarial instruments from Sardinia well into the 1780s, The most immediate effect of the order was thus the further
marginalization of the Sardinians' native idiom, making way for a thorough Italianisation of the island. The first systematic study on the Sardinian language was written in 1782 by the philologist Matteo Madau, with the title of . The intention that motivated Madau was to trace the ideal path through which Sardinian could be elevated to the island's proper national language; nevertheless, according to Amos Cardia, the Savoyard climate of repression on Sardinian culture would induce Matteo Madau to veil its radical proposals with some literary devices, and the author was eventually unable to ever translate them into reality. The first volume of comparative Sardinian dialectology was produced in 1786 by the Catalan Jesuit Andres Febres, known in Italy and Sardinia by the pseudonym of , who returned from
Lima where he had first published a book of
Mapuche grammar in 1764. After he moved to Cagliari, he became fascinated with the Sardinian language as well and conducted some research on three specific dialects; the aim of his work, entitled , was to "write down the rules of the Sardinian language" and spur the Sardinians to "cherish the language of their Homeland, as well as Italian". The government in
Turin, which had been monitoring Febres' activity, decided that his work would not be allowed to be published:
Victor Amadeus III had supposedly not appreciated the fact that the book had a bilingual dedication to him in Italian and Sardinian, a mistake that his successors, while still echoing back to a general concept of "Sardinian ancestral homeland", would from then on avoid, and making exclusive use of Italian to produce their works. As for the reactions that the three-year Sardinian revolutionary period aroused in the island's ruling class, who were now in the process of Italianisation, for Sotgiu "its failure was complete: undecided between a breathless municipalism and a dead-end attachment to the Crown, it did not have the courage to lead the revolutionary wave coming from the countryside". The only result was therefore "the defeat of the peasant class emerging from the very core of feudal society, urged on by the masses of peasants and led by the most advanced forces of the Sardinian bourgeoisie" In the climate of monarchic restoration that followed
Giovanni Maria Angioy's rebellion, whose substantial failure marked therefrom a historic watershed in Sardinia's future, toward which they eventually leaned in the wake of the abortive Sardinian revolution. The identity crisis of the Sardinian ruling class, and their strive for acceptance into the new citizenship of the Italian identity, would manifest itself with the publication of the so-called by the
unionist Pietro Martini in 1863. A few years after the major anti-Piedmontese revolt, in 1811, the priest Vincenzo Raimondo Porru published a timid essay of Sardinian grammar, which, however, referred expressively to the Southern dialect (hence the title of ) and, out of prudence towards the king, was made with the declared intention of easing the acquisition of Italian among his fellow Sardinians, instead of protecting their language. The more ambitious work of the professor and senator
Giovanni Spano, the
Ortographia sarda nationale ("Sardinian National Orthography"), although it was officially meant for the same purpose as Porru's, attempted in reality to establish a unified Sardinian
orthography based on Logudorese, just like
Florentine had become the basis for Italian. in 1856|alt= The jurist Carlo Baudi di Vesme claimed that the suppression of Sardinian and the imposition of Italian was desirable to make the islanders into "civilized Italians". Since Sardinia was, in the words of Di Vesme, "not Spanish, but neither Italian: it is and has been for centuries just Sardinian", it was necessary, at the turn of the circumstances that "inflamed it with ambition, desire and love of all things Italian", to spread the Italian language in Sardinia "presently so little known in the interior" The primary and tertiary education was thus offered exclusively through Italian, and Piedmontese cartographers went on to replace many Sardinian place names with Italian ones. spread Italian for the first time in history to Sardinian villages, marking the troubled transition to the new dominant language; the school environment, which employed Italian as the sole means of communication, grew to become a microcosm around the then-monolingual Sardinian villages. In 1811, the canon Salvatore Carboni published in
Bologna the polemic book ("Holy Discourses in Sardinian language"), wherein the author lamented the fact that Sardinia, "" ("Being an Italian province nowadays, [Sardinia] cannot have laws and public acts made in its own language"), and while claiming that "" ("the Sardinian language, however unofficial, will last as long as Sardinia among the Sardinians"), he also asked himself "" ("Why should we show neglect and contempt for Sardinian, which is a language as ancient and noble as Italian, French and Spanish?"). In 1827, the historical legal code serving as the
consuetud de la nació sardesca in the days of the Iberian rule, the
Carta de Logu, was abolished and replaced by the more advanced Savoyard code of
Charles Felix "
Leggi civili e criminali del Regno di Sardegna", written in Italian. The
Perfect Fusion with the Mainland States, enacted under the auspices of a "transplant, without any reserves and obstacles, [of] the culture and civilization of the Italian Mainland to Sardinia", would result in the loss of the island's residual autonomy Despite the long-term assimilation policy, the anthem of the Savoyard
Kingdom of Sardinia would be ''
S'hymnu sardu nationale ("the Sardinian National Anthem"), also known as Cunservet Deus su Re
("God save the King"), before it was de facto
replaced by the Italian Marcia Reale'' as well, in 1861. However, even when the island became part of the
Kingdom of Italy under
Victor Emmanuel II in 1861, Sardinia's distinct culture from the now unified Mainland made it an overall neglected province within the newly proclaimed unitary
nation state. Between 1848 and 1861, the island was plunged into a social and economic crisis that was to last until the
post-war period. Eventually, Sardinian came to be perceived as / , literally translating into English as "the language of hunger" (i.e. the language of the poor), and Sardinian parents strongly supported the teaching of the Italian tongue to their children, since they saw it as the portal to escaping from a poverty-stricken, rural, isolated and underprivileged life.
Late modern period '' ("The Sardinian Union"), a
daily newspaper in the Italian language founded in 1889 At the dawn of the 20th century, Sardinian had remained an object of research almost only among the island's scholars, struggling to garner international interest and even more suffering from a certain marginalization in the strictly Italian sphere: one observes in fact "the prevalence of foreign scholars over Italian ones and/or the existence of fundamental and still irreplaceable contributions by non-Italian linguists". Previously, Sardinian had been mentioned in a book by August Fuchs on
irregular verbs in Romance languages (, Berlin, 1840) and, later, in the second edition of (1856–1860) written by
Friedrich Christian Diez, credited as one of the founders of Romance
philology.
Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, an undisputed authority on Romance linguistics, published in 1902 an essay on Logudorese Sardinian from the survey of the
condaghe of San Pietro di Silki (, in , Phil. Hist. Kl., 145), the study of which led to the initiation into Sardinian linguistics of the then university student
Max Leopold Wagner: it is to the latter's activity that much of the twentieth-century knowledge and research of Sardinian in the phonetic, morphological and, in part, syntactic fields was generated.) to enlist as Italian subjects and established the
Sassari Infantry Brigade on 1 March 1915 at
Tempio Pausania and
Sinnai. Unlike the other infantry brigades of Italy, Sassari's conscripts were only Sardinians (including many officers). It is currently the only unit in Italy with an anthem in a language other than Italian:
Dimonios ("Devils"), which would be written in 1994 by Luciano Sechi; its title derives from the German-language
Rote Teufel ("red devils"), by which they were popularly known among the troops of the
Austro-Hungarian Army.
Compulsory military service around this period played a role in language shift and is referred to by historian Manlio Brigaglia as "the first great mass "nationalization"" of the Sardinians. Nevertheless, similarly to
Navajo-speaking service members in the United States during
World War II, as well as
Quechua speakers during the
Falklands War, native Sardinians were offered the opportunity to be recruited as
code talkers to transmit tactical information in Sardinian over radio communications which might have otherwise run the risk of being gained by Austrian troops, since some of them hailed from Italian-speaking areas to which, therefore, the Sardinian language was utterly alien: Alfredo Graziani writes in his
war diary that "having learned that many of our phonograms were being intercepted, we adopted the system of communicating on the phone only in Sardinian, certain that in this way they would never be able to understand what one was saying". To avoid infiltration attempts by said Italophone troops, positions were guarded by Sardinian recruits from the Sassari Brigade who required anyone who came to them that they identify themselves first by proving they spoke Sardinian: "". Coinciding with the year of the
Irish War of Independence, Sardinian autonomism re-emerged as an expression of the fighters' movement, coagulating into the
Sardinian Action Party (PsdAz) which, before long, would become one of the most important players in the island's political life. At the beginning, the party would not have had strictly ethnic claims though, being the Sardinian language and culture widely perceived, in the words of Fiorenzo Toso, as "symbols of the region's
underdevelopment". Local cultural expressions were thus repressed, including Sardinia's festivals and improvised poetry competitions, and a large number of
Sardinian surnames were changed to sound more Italian. An argument broke out between the Sardinian poet Antioco Casula (popularly known as
Montanaru) and the fascist journalist Gino Anchisi, who stated that "once the region is moribund or dead", which the regime declared to be, "so will the dialect
(sic)", which was interpreted as "the region's revealing spiritual element"; in the wake of this debate, Anchisi managed to have Sardinian banned from the printing press, as well. The significance of the Sardinian language as it was posed by Casula, in fact, lent itself to potentially subversive themes, being tied to the practices of cultural resistance of an indigenous ethnic group, whose linguistic repertoire had to be introduced in school to preserve a "Sardinian personality" and regain "a dignity" perceived to have been lost in the process. Another famed poet from the island, Salvatore (
Bore) Poddighe, fell into a severe depression and took his own life a few years after his masterwork (
Sa Mundana Cummedia) had been seized by Cagliari's police commissioner. When the use of Sardinian in school was banned in 1934 as part of a nation-wide educational plan against the alloglot "dialects", the then Sardinian-speaking children were confronted with another means of communication that was supposed to be their own from then onwards. On a whole, this period saw the most aggressive cultural assimilation effort by the central government, which led to an even further sociolinguistic degradation of Sardinian. While the interior managed to at least partially resist this intrusion at first, everywhere else the regime had succeeded in thoroughly supplanting the local cultural models with new ones hitherto foreign to the community and compress the former into a "pure matter of folklore", marking a severance from the island's heritage that engendered, according to Guido Melis, "an identity crisis with worrying social repercussions", as well as "a rift that could no longer be healed through the generations". This period is identified by Manlio Brigaglia as the second mass "nationalization" of the Sardinians, which was characterized by "a policy deliberately aiming at "Italianisation"" by means of, in his words, "a declared war" against the usage of the Sardinian language by fascism and the Catholic Church alike. In 1945, following the restoration of political freedoms, the Sardinian Action Party called for autonomy as a federal state within the "new Italy" that had emerged from the
Resistance: it was in the context of the second post-war period that, as consensus for autonomy kept growing, the party began to distinguish itself by policies based on Sardinia's linguistic and cultural specificity. ==Present situation==