Origins and Features
The language's origins have been investigated by several authors; Eduardo Blasco Ferrer's investigation is one of the most thorough. The language derives from Latin, and has been influenced by Catalan and Spanish due to the dominion of the Crown of Aragon and later the Spanish Empire over the island. Logudorese is the northern macro-dialect of the Sardinian language, the southern macro-dialect being Campidanese, spoken in the southern half of the island. The two variants share a clear common origin and history, but have experienced somewhat different developments.
Though the language is typically Romance, some words in it are not of Latin origin, and often are of uncertain etymology. One such is "nura", found in "nuraghe", the main form of pre-Roman building, hence the term for the pre-Roman era as the Nuragic Period. Various place names similarly have roots which defy analysis.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of Logudorian is that, due to the particular history of the area, it has suffered very little contamination and has changed very slowly from Vulgar Latin in comparison to other Latin languages, even though in terms of vocabulary it is not as close to its Latin ancestor as Italian, the most Latin of Romance languages. That said, Campidanese in contrast at times shows more archaic features than Logudorese, particularly in its verb forms, such as. e.g. the retention of the 3rd person plural in -nt, reduced to -n in Logudorese.
Read more about this topic: Logudorese Dialect
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