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.
Read more about this topic: Sardinian Language
Famous quotes containing the words number of, number, speakers, cultural and/or status:
“It is not the number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Cultivated labor drives out brute labor. An infinite number of shrewd men, in infinite years, have arrived at certain best and shortest ways of doing, and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures, harvestings, curings, manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth of our world to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through New England for twice seven trained Wendell Phillips.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values.... Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“screenwriter
Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)