Sardinian Language Revival: From Suppression to Social Media

The Sardinian language, the largest linguistic minority among Italy's 12 recognized groups with over one million speakers, has undergone a revival after decades of decline. Historically, parents stopped teaching Sardinian to their children, believing Italian fluency would ensure better futures. Since 2018, Sardinian has been recognized as an official language, with laws promoting its teaching, radio and TV programs entirely in Sardinian, children's workshops, and youth using it on social media. Writer Paola Soriga explores this shift in the new issue of The Passenger, a book-magazine by Iperborea dedicated to Sardinia. The volume presents a Sardinia far from postcard images, covering protests against military installations, overtourism, literary festivals, depopulation of inland regions, Mediterranean anemia, and language recovery. Soriga's personal narrative connects her family's experience—her grandparents spoke only Sardinian, but her parents chose Italian for her generation—to broader patterns of linguistic domination. She recounts her 2023 radio program on Rai Sardegna entirely in Sardinian, which moved her family, mirroring a story from the Radio Ambulante podcast about a Haitian journalist speaking Creole on TV. The article includes a 1927 letter from Antonio Gramsci urging his sister to let her children speak Sardinian freely, warning that suppressing it harms intellectual development. The feature is published in collaboration with Iperborea.