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

This investigation focuses on the analysis of the vitality of Sardinian varieties in migration contexts and discusses the use of corpus linguistics methodologies to highlight the outcomes of language contact phenomena in the heritage scenarios. Despite the recent interest in the Italian heritage languages, this field of research is still unexplored, due to the lack of data resources available to the scientific community. This contribution intends to provide an in-depth description of the features of Heritage Sardinian, focusing on (i) internal linguistics phenomena, (ii) consequences of language contact, (iii) sociolinguistic layering of Heritage Sardinian; (iv) ideological values concerning Heritage Sardinian maintenance. Finally, this work aims at contributing to the studies of theoretical linguistics focused on Sardinian and at showing the potentialities of corpus methodologies for the study of language contact in migration contexts.