Lucia Grimaldi (Free University of Berlin, Dpt. of Romance Languages)

Eva-Maria Remberger (University of Cologne, Dpt. of Linguistic Data Processing)

 

The Promotion of the Sardinian Language and Culture via the Internet: Fields of Activity and Perspectives

 

0. Introduction

 

In a workshop session dealing with minority languages and the media the most actual and discussed medium internet can of course not be left out. We would like to present you the activities and perspectives of a project whose main task is the promotion of the Sardinian language and culture via the internet.

Our paper is organised as follows: First we will shortly depict the typological, legal and sociolinguistic status of the Sardinian language. Secondly we will present our work with the medium internet, laying particular stress on the aspects of communication, language preservation, networking and language tools.[1] Thirdly we will conclude with an overview of the results achieved and bring together these results in a context of prospective future work still to be carried out.

 

 

1.      The Status of Sardinian

 

Before we present our project to you let us shortly sketch the situation of the Sardinian language.

 

Sardinian is a Romance language spoken by approximately one million[2] speakers on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, which politically belongs to Italy.

 

1.1 The Sociolinguistic Status

 

Although linguists have been claiming that Sardinian ought to be considered a distinct language for at least 100 years (cf. Meyer-Lübke 1901), it has been politically and sociologically treated as an Italian dialect with all the consequences originating from such a status, i.e. less prestige, a usage restricted to a familiar environment etc. A short comparative look at the distribution of Sardinian language usage within the actual parent-children generation may demonstrate this:

 

TAB. 1 / QUALI LINGUE PARLA TUO PADRE? (%)[3]

("Which languages does your father speak?")

 

Sardo	It./S.	It.	It./Altra l.	It./S./Altra l.	N.r.
1.8	61	5.7	4.2	26.1	1.2

 

 

TAB. 2 / QUALI LINGUE PARLA TUA MADRE? (%)

("Which languages does your mother speak")

 

Sardo	It./S.	It.	It./Altra l.	It./S./Altra l.	N.r.
0.9	64.3	7.8	3.6	22.8	0.6

 

TAB. 3 / TU QUALI LINGUE PARLI? (%)

("Which languages do you speak?")

 

Sardo	It./S.	It.	It./Altra l.	It./S./Altra l.	N.r.
0	51.1	33.3	1.8	13.8	0

 

 

TAB. 21 / TI SENTI PIÚ A TUO AGIO QUANDO PARLI: (%)

("Do you feel more comfortable when you speak:")

 

Sardo	It.	It./S.	N.r.
5.7	69.4	24	0.9

 

While in 1988 only about 10% of the Sardinian parent generation did not speak Sardinian at all, the percentage among their children reached 35% and about 70% of the children feel more comfortable in speaking Italian than they do speaking Sardinian.

These data show that Sardinian parents often have made a clear decision not to talk Sardinian to their children. The reason for this decision is that they think that speaking Italian as the first language will give them better opportunities in general, especially at school. In fact, it has been noticed, that among children who had to repeat their scholastic year the percentage of Sardinian speaking children is higher-than-average (cf. Sole 1990:70).     

 

In Euromosaic the sociolinguistic status of the Sardinian language is described as follows:

 

"The language has no prestige and is used in work only as a natural as opposed to a systematic process. It seems to be a language relegated to a highly localised function of interaction between friends and relatives. Its institutional base is extremely weak and declining. Yet there is concern among its speakers who have an emotive link to the language and its relationship to Sardinian identity."[4]

 

During the last few years things have changed, at least concerning the political situation: there has been an official recognition of the status of Sardinian as a language, first by the island's local legislation in 1997.[5] The Italian State followed suit two years later with a law called Norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche ("norms for the protection of historical linguistic minorities"),[6] which allows the usage of Sardinian in school.[7]

There aren't any data available up to now describing how the political changes have influenced the linguistic reality in Sardinia.

 

1.2 Diatopic Variation

 

Nevertheless there still is another obstacle to the promotion of Sardinian in a broader field of public life, namely the fact that there still is no such thing as a standard Sardinian variety, neither is there a standardised orthography, which could be used in the more general contexts of administration, schooling etc. In fact the Sardinian language comprises of at least two larger groups of varieties:

 

 

Figure 1 – Diatopic Variation

 

Campidanian which has the greatest number of speakers is spoken in the south. In the north, we have Logudorian, the variety with the highest prestige, due to its important historical and literary tradition. The central Logudorian variety, i.e. the dialects of the region of Nuoro, has been given lots of attention by linguists due to its strongly archaic character and similarity to Latin; it is therefore quite well documented. Finally we have two varieties in the North, spoken in the regions of Sassari and Gallura which have an intermediate status between Italian and Sardinian. In addition to these we have two clearly non-Sardinian varieties: Catalan in Alghero and Ligurian on the small islands to the south-west of Sardinia.

This strong diatopic variation, as a result of the turbulent history of Sardinia – as you may know, Sardinia was occupied by different foreign conquerors over considerable periods - causes serious problems for the promotion of the Sardinian language, simply due to the fact, that many efforts are directed to answering the question: which Sardinian variety should be promoted?

An answer to this question is the most important preliminary objective to be reached before tackling the issue of the promotion of Sardinian.[8] There have been several attempts to propose at least a standard orthographic variety valid for all Sardinians, from a monodialectal based selection of Logudorian as the variety with the greatest literal tradition to a polydialectal based synthetic solution keeping phonetic differences and unifying only orthography. The Sardinian Regional Government has established a Commission for the development of a Sardinian standard and at present there is an official proposal of standardisation being discussed by regional politicians, which has given rise to highly controversial reactions. Reaching consent on any proposal seems to be a difficult task.

   We would now like to sketch the main objectives of our project and we hope to show that despite the importance of a solution to this problem, very much can be done for the promotion of a minority language, without a standard variety yet being available.

 

 

2.     Internet as a tool for the promotion of Sardinian: Limba e Curtura de sa Sardigna

 

After having given you a quick overview of the status of the Sardinian language, we would now like to introduce you to our project, called: Limba e curtura de sa Sardigna[9], i.e. "The Sardinian language and culture". This project was initiated in 1994 by Guido Mensching, at that time research assistant at the Department of Linguistic Data Processing at the University of Cologne, and Jürgen Rolshoven, the head of department. Apart from his main research on machine translation J. Rolshoven is a great promoter of minority languages and it was he who gave G. Mensching the possibility to write the first philological grammar for German learners of the Sardinian language: the book was published in the series edited by Rolshoven called Bibliothek Romanischer Sprachlehrwerke, i.e. "Collection of textbooks in Romance languages". This series includes not only this introduction to Sardinian, but also an introduction to Catalan and Occitan among others.[10]

The Sardinian internet project initially started as a mere experiment - just a web site on Sardinian - which soon proved to be a most efficient instrument to retrieve and manage data concerning the Sardinian language community. The objectives duly defined were the following:

 

-         to constitute an international exchange forum on issues concerning the Sardinian language and culture

-         to supply an extensive documentation on the Sardinian language

-         to collect and analyse linguistic data assisted by the sardophone internet community

-         to build up text archives and larger corpora

-         to provide the internet community with a series of useful language tools.

At present, Guido Mensching, who holds a chair in Linguistics of Romance Languages at the Free University of Berlin, is pursuing the project together with Lucia Grimaldi while Jürgen Rolshoven and Eva Remberger are his collaborators at the University of Cologne, where it all started.

In the following sections we will describe various aspects of our experience using the Sardinian language on the internet and using the internet as a tool for promoting the Sardinian language. All these aspects follow from the above defined objectives.

 

2.1  Communication

 

Since the vitality of a language depends on its natural usage in as many situations and contexts as possible, one of the principle objectives with our internet project is an active extension of Sardinian language usage on the internet.

 

2.1.1 Writing in Sardinian

 

It might seem natural that a web site on the Sardinian language and culture should be presented in Sardinian. Nevertheless, this was at that time an unusual thing to do, considering the sociolinguistic status of the Sardinian language mentioned above. Since Sardinian is usually spoken in a more familiar environment, it is mainly associated with oral communication. Written texts still remain the exception.[11] Another circumstance to be considered is that there was no native speaker of Sardinian in our project working group.

When we decided to offer a platform for discussions on Sardinian language and culture to the visitors of our web-page and started to run the mailing list SA-LIMBA ("The Language", implicitly "the Sardinian language" in Sardinian) in January 1999, we found out that people wrote automatically in Sardinian, although – as Mensching notices - "... nobody told the participants to do so"[12]. He claims that this could be an "orality effect" of the medium e-mail, which is felt as a medium for familiar communication, and therefore the authors of e-mails feel more at ease writing in Sardinian.[13] This is certainly an important aspect. But probably the most important reason is simply the one that people saw their language being considered important enough to be used for an official web-site and even interesting enough for foreigners to learn: Therefore they felt that they could also overcome their lack of confidence and write in Sardinian themselves. Cf. the following quotation from one of the typical "first" messages of SA-LIMBA:

 

"I don't know when this list was established and I don't even know how many we are. But the curiosity of writing in Sardinian is really high (...). I would like to thank Guido for giving me the possibility of writing Sardinian. I don't speak it at home, my Dad and Mum speak just Italian with me, but they speak Sardinian to each other, and now I have the opportunity to learn how to write it. I would like to know, whether you're able to read my writing and whether you find some errors in my messages! (...)" (Ivana 23.01.99) [14]

 

2.1.2 Transdialectal Communication

 

There is another peculiarity of this mailing list which should be mentioned. As has been said above, Sardinian is usually used in a relatively small local radius, in the villages, in the family, among friends and mainly for non-formal communication purposes. This is clearly not the case in SA-LIMBA.

In fact, most of the members of the list didn't know each other before SA-LIMBA started. They come from different parts of the island, some of them are emigrants living outside Sardinia. A small minority is not Sardinian at all, but learned Sardinian as a foreign language, sometimes only thanks to communication in the list. This means that the members of SA-LIMBA speak - and therefore write - very different varieties of Sardinian.

Nevertheless, this doesn't seem to be a serious obstacle for communication. Although there is no common standard and even no standardised orthography we found that speakers of different Sardinian dialects don't seem to have problems in understanding each other, at least in writing. "This contradicts the widespread opinion that Campidanian and Logudorian are mutually incomprehensible" (cf. Mensching: forthcoming).

Yet the participants on the list become of course aware of linguistic differences. There is a great wish to discuss the problems of standardisation and especially the problem of the missing standard orthography. The codification of a standard variety thus became a central theme of discussion between native speakers and several linguistic experts on the mailing list. It goes without saying that tackling these questions is indispensable for the long-term survival of a language.

Of course, nobody expects to find a solution to the Sardinian "Questione della Lingua" (i.e. discussion on a standardised variety) in a mailing list. But since the members of SA-LIMBA belong to the few Sardinian speakers directly concerned with the problem of diatopic variation and who actually write Sardinian, they shall represent an ideal group to which one could refer to, for example for testing the acceptance of existing concepts on orthographic standardisation.

In our opinion, if consent on this subject is reached at all, the communication through the internet will certainly contribute to making the standard known to a greater number of speakers.

Prior to this happening, there is another advantage which could be drawn by the experience with SA-LIMBA: as said before, in SA-LIMBA many people write Sardinian for the first time and they don't have a standardised orthography which they could refer to. This means that they have to write spontaneously and in a way they consider to be convenient. Linguists could analyse these spontaneous decisions on orthography and try to derive a user-friendly phonetically oriented solution to the standardisation of orthography.

 

2.1.3 The "Ausbau" of the Sardinian Language

 

As has been shown, the topics discussed in SA-LIMBA are sometimes quite complex, e.g. the question of standardisation, the legal status of the language and so forth. This forces the members of SA-LIMBA to adapt their colloquial Sardinian language to the needs of wider contexts, an undoubtedly necessary condition for the development of Sardinian into a fully emancipated language.

On the one hand an extension of syntactic and lexical instruments is necessary for a broader applicability of the language. Especially lexical extension is a recurring topic of discussion in SA-LIMBA. The members of the list often propose lexical solutions for naming new technologies (e.g. virus, chat) or bring forward proposals to substitute Italianisms.

However, the fact itself that people are able to discuss these topics in Sardinian has to be seen as a real success. According to the concept of "Ausbau" as described by Kloss:

 

"the written form of a language generally begins with poetry, short stories, and then fiction [...]; another stage unfolds once a language is used for "dialectic" or non-narrative prose (Sachprosa). This stage contains three distinct levels of language [...]: popular dialectic prose, that is simple writings in the form of pedagogical, political or religious materials; then refined dialectic prose, which englobes more sophisticated writings such as essential findings pertaining to the language group in question or to pure sciences and the humanities; and, finally, learned dialectic prose, which corresponds to original work in a variety of disciplines."[15]

 

One could say that in SA-LIMBA Sardinian has reached at least the second initial stage, that is, the level of "popular dialectic prose", but in many contributions an even higher level is definitely achieved. This means that even if this "Ausbau" has not reached all members of SA-LIMBA yet, they at least get in contact with a highly complex scientific prose.

 

2.1.4 The Emancipation of the Sardinian Language

 

Another psychologically important advantage of internet communication in general is that the Sardinian language is given an opportunity for usage in communication beyond regional and national borders without intermediation through the dominant language, Italian. Mensching notes that in contrast to the normal situation, in which minority languages do not get in contact with other languages directly, but only through the mediation of the dominant language (cf. the concept of "interposició" in Aracil 1983:181ff.), "the special point about the internet is that everyone can communicate with anybody, so we can have a direct connection from anywhere with our minority language" (cf. Mensching: forthcoming).

In our experience, the opportunity to speak/write Sardinian over the internet is a very motivating aspect that leads to a higher self-confidence among the speakers of a minority language. We hope that this self-confidence together with the extension of the language to broader contexts reached via an internet platform can encourage Sardinian speakers to use their language more often, also beyond the internet.

 

At present about 150 members are subscribed on the SA-LIMBA list which has an average production of 25 messages a week. We have also established a chat-room for even more spontaneous communication.

 

 

 

2.2  Preservation

 

Concerning our project's attempt to contribute to the preservation of the Sardinian language there are two main sources of text material available and several directions in which to proceed in order to make use of them for research and preservation purposes.

 

2.2.1 Text Sources

 

The text material at our disposal consists of the Sardinian Text Database (STD) on the one hand and the e-mail corpus of messages to the mailing list SA-LIMBA on the other.[16]

 

2.2.1.1 STD: The Sardinian Text Database

 

The STD is one of the first initiatives of the project and stems from the idea that using the internet there might be a chance to gather electronic texts in quite an easy way, provided that there is a consistent number of native speakers (or also non native speakers) willing to collaborate with us as contributors.

Whoever comes across the project web site will find a note that all kinds of texts written in Sardinian would be welcome and could be sent to us by e-mail. These texts then are published as HTML-documents on the same site, naming the contributors, their comments on the texts, if any, the origin of the texts and the variety of Sardinian they are written in. The STD was one of the earliest activities of the project and now it has grown to a size of ca. 125 larger and minor texts of different types. They include:

 

-         popular literature such as a calendary, songs and fairy tales

-         translations of modern and classical literature (mainly poetry, including songs) into Sardinian

-         texts written by contemporary authors, mainly poetry, often contributed by the authors themselves

-         occasional spontaneous poems written by the users in the context of the mailing list

-         newspaper articles

-         texts relating to the culture and history of Sardinia.

 

The varieties the texts are written in cover a wide range of diatopic variation of both, the Campidanian and the Logudorian area. They also include many local subvarieties.

 

2.2.1.2 The corpus of SA-LIMBA

 

One of the main advantages of the mailing list SA-LIMBA, besides the orality effects and communicative stimulus mentioned before, is the fact that it is public: as such it is possible to store mail by mail of written Sardinian conversation in an equally publicly accessible archive (see http://www.uni-koeln.de/bin2/maillist/sa-limba/). It therefore becomes a rich source of language material admissible to be quoted, elaborated and used for further purposes with the contributor's full consent.

 

2.2.2 Elaboration

 

Of course, the text material we dispose of is in a state which asks strongly for further elaboration. There are two main objectives we are presently working on:

The first, concerning the STD, is to install a real database system, preferably a MySQL database, which can be queried by a CGI-script written in Perl or a similar scripting language. This is meant to substitute our yet too static simple HTML-documents which are, due to their growing number, not very comfortable to browse anymore. Such a database, of course, has got to offer different views, allow ordering the stored text objects by variety, text type etc.     

The second, and far more important objective, is to work on an XML-tagging scheme, be it for the STD, or be it for the corpus of SA-LIMBA. Especially in the latter case, there are several steps to be considered:

 

-         the automatically archived data have got to be more elaborately filtered for non textual elements, double HTML-tagging etc. It has also got to be manually proofread for non-Sardinian contributions.

-         the single messages have got to be tagged in a manner that allows selective information desired by the reader.

-         The message body itself has got to undergo detailed morphological syntactic and lexical tagging – and the parsing rules to the purpose still have to be checked for their linguistic wellformedness. This grammatical tagging should respect all graphical and dialectal variation however be in part carried out automatically.

 

A written corpus of Sardinian which has been successfully tagged in the manner described above, would be an important contribution to Sardinian lexicology as well as to a future module for machine analysis and translation (Rolshoven 1999:167). The variety converter within this system should be able to cope with Sardinian language variation.[17]

 

 

2.3  Information and Networking

 

2.3.1 Information

 

In the first place our portal offers lots of information on Sardinia(n) in general, such as the history of Sardinia, the grammar and lexicon of the Sardinian language, the different varieties etc. We have several clickable linguistic maps of Sardinia, where one can see, how things are named on the different parts of the island.

Another important objective of our project is to collect actual information such as the announcement of conferences, language courses, news about the legal status of Sardinian etc. We also try to document the developments on the standardisation debate by publishing the different proposals discussed.

Finally, a broad collection of hyperlinks on Sardinia(n), which is permanently updated by the project members, often thanks to the indications of members of SA-LIMBA, makes our site a starting point to obtain more information on Sardinian language and culture. Special attention is given to sites written in Sardinian language, since our principal objective is the promotion of the Sardinian language.

These objectives can only be accomplished due to an extremely privileged situation: Since our internet site is quite well-known in the Sardinian speaking community and thanks to our numerous contacts with other universities and non-academic institutions, we always obtain the latest information on new related web presences as well as on new institutions dedicated to Sardinian language and culture. We are also contacted for announcements of events and meetings on the subject.

 

2.3.2 Networking

 

Another central aspect of our work is the use of the virtual environment to realise non-virtual projects, through the contacts achieved by our internet activities. In this context an alliance of international scholars of Sardinian language gathered to form the Sardinian Language Group, which in the last two years has been organising a summer-school on Sardinian linguistics in Sardinia. Another virtual contact, namely that with the Sardinian Cultural Circle of Berlin, led to the organisation of a conference which will be held in Berlin at the end of this year. It is supposed to bring together the most important international scholars in the field of Sardinian language and will probably be sponsored by the Sardinian Regional Government.

From a linguistic point of view there is another important aspect of networking which should be mentioned here: through the mailing list SA-LIMBA we are given the possibility to establish a meeting point between linguists and native speakers. Many of the SA-LIMBA messages could be gathered under the slogan: "Ask a native speaker". This opportunity is not only used by members of SA-LIMBA but often also by linguists or other researchers interested in some details of Sardinian language: for example there was a student from Hungary asking native speakers of SA-LIMBA to answer some questions relevant for a thesis in sociolinguistics. Such cases are quite frequent.

This also works the other way round: there are many questions by Sardinian speakers directed to linguists, such as the etymology of Sardinian words, the experiences with standardisation in other languages etc. This great interest for linguistic problems is not surprising considering that the members of SA-LIMBA have the extremely high linguistic sensibility of people who are confronted with the problems of minority language and - in most cases - bilingualism.

We would like to mention an example of applying such networking in practice. Some time ago a non-Sardinian student contacted SA-LIMBA on a question concerning affirmation particles in Sardinian. Collecting the answers of the members of SA-LIMBA and asking them which variety they spoke, we were able to revise a linguistic map of the AIS (Vol. VIII, 2: Map 1659) and even to complete it with some new values: thanks to this additional information we were able to establish a hypothesis about the distribution of the different particles in relation to the different varieties of Sardinian.[18]

 

2.4. Language Tools and Linguistic Analysis

 

Since it was possible to collect all the language material mentioned above with the assistance of the Sardinian speaking internet community, it should be natural that in return we put this wealth at the disposal of whoever is interested in the Sardinian language. Therefore we are working on smaller programmes, mostly written in Perl, which could function as language tools giving the visitors of our web site the possibility either to evaluate the material available or to contribute to the knowledge of Sardinian with actual input. Two of the language tools which are already working will be briefly presented here.

 

2.4.1 Concordancing

 

Since the STD is not a searchable, i.e. real database system yet, the users are given the possibility to search for a certain string in the corpus of all STD texts stored up to now with a concordancing program. Taking keywords as a search string, such as limba ('language') for example, one will be able to have a unified view of all occurences of the keyword in context (KWIC) in a few seconds.

Internally, we use another version of this programm to evaluate the SA-LIMBA archive. Since this corpus is quite unique in its being up-to-date and its size, results from concordancing will have some relevance in the work of linguistic verification.

To bring just a short and also significant example:

The Sardinian language has no special suffix for adverbs, i.e. adverbs are either lexical entries (such as bene, mezus, paris) or built periphrastically (in manera pretzisa) or just used in the adjectival form (su termine locudoresu l` has a traduer derettu in italianu).[19]

Looking at a selective concordance using the search string "mente" surprisingly reveals, that Sardinian speakers are quite inclined to use the Italian suffix -mente to form Sardinian adverbs. This is a clear phenomenon of interference, as it is known, showing up in the speech of bilingual speakers or native speakers who are exposed continuously to the influence of a dominant language, especially if this language belongs to the same language family. Results such as these could contribute to a process of sensibilisation among the speakers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2 – Selective Concordance for mente

 

2.4.2 An interactive basic dictionary of Sardinian

 

As for the interactive dictionary, there is an experimental version running since mid April. In contrast to the interactive dictionary of Mario Puddu[20] which is a complete dictionary with more than 90.000 entries, our dictionary had, on release, no single entry. It was developed just to cover the basic vocabulary of Sardinian, namely ca. 2700 entries. We want this basic vocabulary (for which we had to choose the Italian basic vocabulary as a reference point[21]) to cover as many local varieties as possible. This is a distinctive feature to Puddu's dictionary: he gives a series of variations for one lexical entry, however without giving information on the exact origin of each varying alternative.

The Ditzionàriu Basilare de sa limba Sarda, as it is called by its Sardinian name, now has about 200 entries, coming from 5 villages and 12 informants. It is not an overwhelming number yet, but we are just at the beginning of an experiment. These informants, Sardinian native speakers who wish to contribute with lexical information from their local villages, have to answer a very short questionnaire in order to assure a minimal of sociolinguistic data which are then archived in a DBM database. After having registered the contributors get a password with which they are allowed to access the input form and supply their data (also stored in a DBM database).

As for the output it is, of course, accessible to everybody and we hope that soon there will be several varying forms for every Italian base entry, as shown here in the example bagnare ('to wet'):

 

 

Paraula italiana: bagnare
Tradutzione a su sardu: ilfundere
Bidda: pattada
Commentos:

Paraula italiana: bagnare
Tradutzione a su sardu: sciundiri
Bidda: casteddu
Commentos:

Paraula italiana: bagnare
Tradutzione a su sardu: sciundi, sfundi
Bidda: iglesias
Commentos:

Como b'at 200 intradas in su Ditzionàriu Basilare de sa Limba Sarda

Torrare a sa chilca

 

 

Figure 3- Output for the Italian entry bagnare

 

Once we have reached a consistent number of entries, we plan an automatic tagging system transforming the data into an XML/SGML-tagged version of the basic dictionary, following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).[22] This version would be easily accessible to other applications.

 

 

3. Perspectives

 

On the basis of our experience with the project Limba e curtura de sa Sardigna we have gained evidence that the tasks listed above are definitely extremely relevant for the protection of endangered languages, such as Sardinian.

Up to now our aims have been concentrated on activities preliminary to or independent from the establishment of a unified standard variety. Should a standard be achieved (and we are of the opinion that it will finally happen, since the majority of Sardinian population seems to wish so), we can imagine many additional fields of activity:

 

-         propagation of the standard (dictionary of basic words derived from our interactive dictionary, orthography rules, different "appendix probi" for the different varieties). In this case our project would of course use the standard variety.

-         in the field of language processing tools one perspective is the evaluation of spontaneous orthography. If there will be such a thing as a Sardinian orthographic standard one day, it would be possible to implement a 'Sardinian variety converter', i.e. a system that is able to transform the input written in one variety to the output of another, having as a reference point the interlingua of the (virtual) standard (see Rolshoven 1999: 165-166): of course this requires at least a morphological analysis and a variety based dictionary (see above). As for syntax there are no real obstacles since the Sardinian varieties - at least under this aspect - are quite homogeneous (see Jones 1993).[23]

-         Further projects in the field of language processing are the implementation of linguistic knowledge for the LPS system, a system for machine translation and analysis developed at the University of Cologne.[24]

 

The project Limba e Curtura de sa Sardigna now has also become known outside the university and beyond the Sardinian internet community: Recently there has been a very encouraging number of newspaper and magazine articles on our project not only in the Sardinian[25] press but also in the Italian and German print media; there have also been several broadcasting corporations reporting on Sardinia which came across our project and invited G. Mensching as a key speaker for their transmissions.

In our paper we hope to have shown how the project uses the internet to promote the Sardinian language. Besides the single aspects of using the internet - communication, preservation, networking and language tools - presented here, there also is this very pleasant side effect that since our work takes place very close to the public - this is a great difference to many university research projects - we very much appreciate the emotional support by and direct contact to the users on our list.

The growing publicity and interests our project site is receiving will certainly also contribute to the promotion of Sardinian, an aim which finally has always stood at the heart of the project.

 

 

References:

 

Aracil, Lluís (1983): Dir la realitat. Barcelona: Edicions Països Catalans.

AIS – Jaberg, Karl & Jud, Jacob (1928-1940): Sprach und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz, I-VIII, Zofingen: Ringier.

Blasco Ferrer, Eduardo (1998): Pro Domo. La cultura e la lingua sarda verso l'Europa. Cagliari: Condaghes.

Cichon, Peter (1999): Einführung in die okzitanische Sprache. Bonn: Romanistischer Verlag.

Euromosaic 1:  "Sardinian in Italy". http://www.uoc.es/euromosaic/web/document/sard/an/i1/i1.html.

Euromosaic 2: "Sardinian language use survey". http://www.uoc.es/euromosaic/web/document/sard/an/e1/e1.html

Ethnologue - Languages of the World. 13^th Edition (revised on December 7^th, 2000): "Sardinian". http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/Ital.html#SRD

Grimaldi, Lucia & Mensching, Guido (forthcoming): "Emmo, eja, si: Bejahungspartikeln im Sardischen."

Jones, Michael Allan (1993): Sardinian Syntax. London / New York: Routledge.

Kloss, Heinz & McConnell, Grant D. (eds.) (1989): The Written Languages of the World: A Survey of the Degree and Modes of Use/Les langues écrites du monde: relevé du degré et des modes d'utilisation. Volume 3: Western Europe/L'Europe occidentale. Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval.

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