Regional Italian of Sardinia

This chapter analyses some features of the regional Italian of Sardinia. After briefly describing Sardinia’s sociolinguistic context, several key phenomena of Sardinian regional Italian (e.g., metaphony, consonantal lengthening, differential object marking, present continuous, word order) are considered. Data analysis shows that the grammatical structures of Sardinian dialects have affected the regional Italian of Sardinia, but these effects may differ along the diastratic and diatopic axes. This study also points out that for certain fields, such as the lexicon, it is not easy to measure the impact of Sardinian dialects on the regional Italian of Sardinia.