On the vitality of Sardinian as a heritage language. A corpus-based study

Despite the growing interest in the Italian heritage languages (cf. Bettoni and Rubino 1996, Haller 1997, Turchetta 2005, Prifti 2013, among others), a complete account of Sardinian varieties in migration contexts is still lacking. In particular, an approach based on corpus linguistics methodologies turns out to be extremely useful to highlight the most recurrent features of language contact phenomena in the heritage scenarios. This contribution aims at providing an in-depth description of Heritage Sardinian (hereinafter HS) characteristics, focusing on: i) internal linguistics phenomena, ii) consequences of language contact (code-switching, code-mixing, language attrition); iii) sociolinguistic layering of HS (communicative domains, positioning in linguistics repertories among other linguistic varieties); iv) ideological values concerning HS maintenance (explicit judgements of speakers about HS, willing to preserve HS in second generations).