Number of Speakers and Cultural Status
The Sardinian language is one of the principal elements of Sardinian cultural heritage, and there is activity dedicated to studying the language and acknowledging its importance; the recognition of the Sardinian language as a prominent element of the cultural identity is diffusely supported by the population.
The Sardinian language has recently been recognised, together with other local languages, as an official regional language by the Sardinian Region; it can therefore be used for official purposes on the island.
In the last decade, the Sardinian language has been legally recognized (with Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, and Occitan) by the Law 482-1999, yet its actual acknowledgement in the present-day life is hard. For example, in many Italian libraries and universities, the books about Sardinian language are still grouped under the labels Linguistica italiana (Italian linguistics), Dialetti italiani (Italian dialects) or Dialettologia italiana (Italian dialectology), despite its legal recognition as a different language.
Despite the political campaigns launched in order to put Sardinian on an equal footing with Italian, and any emotive value linked to Sardinian identity, the sociolinguistic situation in Sardinia due to several reasons, mainly political and socioeconomic (the gradual depopulation of the island's interior and rural exodus towards more urbanized and industrialized areas, the forced use of Italian presented as a prerequisite to get jobs and as one of the keys to social advancement, the barriers to communication between the dialectal varieties etc.) has resulted in a constant regression, though it is not homogeneous throughout the island; many Sardinians (especially those born in the towns, far more populated than the villages) are raised in families in which bilingual parents spoke to them predominantly Italian, being the children monolingual and with little proficiency in Sardinian. Nowadays, Sardinian is a language living in an unstable status of diglossia and code-switching; UNESCO classifies the language as endangered as "many children learn the language, but some of them cease to use it throughout the school years": there is a serious decline of language ability from one generation to the next, in which Sardinian is being replaced by Italian.
A bill of Monti's government would further lower the level of protection of the language, already quite low, implementing a distinction between the languages protected by international agreements (German, Slovenian, French and Ladin) and those related to communities that do not have a foreign state behind their shoulders. This project has caused some reaction from some parts of the intellectual and political world of the island.
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