Italiano e sardo nella scuola: percezioni e opinioni degli studenti sulla scuola plurilingue

Italian national language policies and Sardinian regional ones allow for the presence of Sardinian in school activities alongside Italian. However, these policies have been implemented sporadically. Here, attitudes and opinions of Sardinian students towards potential uses of Italian and Sardinian at school were investigated with both the Matched-Guise Technique and a questionnaire. The former revealed that speakers reading a formal text in Sardinian are perceived as suitable for being teachers, not less than those same speakers reading the same text in Italian. In particular, students who had already experienced school activities in Sardinian gave favourable evaluations to the Sardinian guises. The questionnaire showed that the predominant role of Italian as school language is undisputed, but students expressed a very positive orientation towards the possibility of also including Sardinian in the school domain. Nevertheless, the possibility of using Sardinian as medium of instruction alongside Italian proved to be very divisive. In this respect, the youngest students, those around ten years of age, turned out to be more positively inclined towards such a possibility than high-school students in the mid- and late adolescence.