Sardinian spoken

Infrequently, but it does happen, in Porto Rafael people complain about Sardinians, blamed for every single hitch. Owners and tenants when meeting occasionally at the market - one of the best in the area, with an excellent selection of products aimed at Italians and foreigns - by glances and half-words make an appointment at Harry's Bar outside, to talk freely far from the ears of the three market owners: Grazietta, Ilaria and Giulia. Once the shopping is over, while Ilaria has just finished advising an uncertain English lady on the best oil to buy, here come vacationers by groups of two or three, go ordering a cappuccino to Diego (over which there would also be a lot to say, but he is from Rome, and for the moment he will be spared).

Discussion is rigorously divided into three main modules:

1. "Plumbing affairs" (there are those who swear they had to wait until 2 pm for an intervention scheduled for 8 am, with the result that the boat trip has gone downhill);

2. "Saltiness damages", even if more realistically attributable to the sea;

3. "Local maids", which is when the round table is divided into two work subgroups: "Sardinians no longer want to do menial jobs" and "Citizenship income: calamity of our times";

Porto Rafael's guests arrive from the 4 corners of the world and at certain moments Harry's Bar looks truly a small Babel teeming with different idioms and accents. You see Italians, English, French, Austrians, Russians, Czechs, Americans who magically understand each other, combining words from all European languages, mixed together at random by those who know to be citizens of the world in defiance of the most elementary grammatical rules.

When even the latecomer plumber shows up for a coffee - after having explained to the furious tenant that he just needs to turn on the tap for having water - it seems that people around voluntarily raise voices, everyone tries to emerge, maybe to impress him. We witness the representation of a ridicolous class struggle, aimed at discrediting plumber's crude talent in conversing with pipes, when compared to their subtle reasoning and intellect strategies with which, modesty aside, they hold the entire social structure, and therefore plumber's family too. However, the more generous ones invite the plumber at the table: "Willst du was trinken?", but the technician doesn't understand German, he smiles politely and leaves regaining his van, they wait for him in Arzachena.

Screams cease, holidaymakers resume their complaints against the Sardinians with usual worldly muttering, "... and they don't even know a language other than Italian", someone  says, greeted by applause and nods of approval.  Grazietta, at the same bar in a break from work, takes the floor. No one has noticed her presence, we are so used seeing her in the shop at work, that more than one even believes she lives there permanently , given that nuraghes are no longer considered up to standard.

She speaks in a natural tone of voice, neither high nor low:

“In the Sardinian area there are two fundamental dialectal groupings: Logudorese in the northern part and Campidanese in the southern part.

Since 1997 the regional law has recognized the Sardinian language as having equal dignity with respect to Italian. Since 1999, the Sardinian language has also been protected by the national law on linguistic minorities; among the twelve groups in question, the Sardinian one constitutes the most robust community in absolute terms although in continuous lack in the number of locutors. The Sardinian language was born, like the other neo-Latin languages, from the evolution of the Latin imported to the island by the Romans starting from the 3rd century BC.

At the crisis of the empire, Sardinia fell under the control of the Vandals, but the Latin idiom was by now widespread throughout the island and remained the primary character of its linguistic constitution. Towards the beginning of the second millennium AD. the first written documents testify to the emergence of internal differentiations in particular between the southern and northern variants. For scholars of Latin and Romance languages, Sardinian has earned its own particular place as a typological case of language which, despite its evolution, has remained very close to the forms of the original Latin. Subsequently, due to the effect of the different peoples who arrive on the island, the autochthonous language is exposed, to varying degrees, to the influence of different external languages ​​which modify and enrich the lexicon in a particular way. Although the island's ruling classes embrace the dominant language of the moment from time to time, giving rise to a substantial plurilingualism, the populations remain stubbornly attached to the varieties of their language, making it survive to the present day. One coffee, thanks. Actually: unu cafeu, gratzias.”

Everyone looks dumbstruck. "If you allow, Grazietta, let me offer," says a woman shyly in general embarrassment. From behind, a man Vicentine in his fortys, a tenent who usually rents Villa Aidan on the last two weeks of July, exclaims candidly : "The hell, you Sardinians, how touchy you are!".