Language is the Truth

By Efis Livingtongue

Manuel, a Sardinian long-time expat and a tireless language lover, embarks himself in an enlightening mission to learn and rescue the endangered autochthonous tongue of his island, a place full of both natural wonders and social issues.

On one hand, surrounded by multiculturalism and multilingualism typical of contemporary Berlin, Manuel continues his linguistic journey describing and analysing modern society in many of its aspects while, on the other hand, he tries figuring out the message of some strange recurring dreams, where the mysterious story of Luisu will bring him back to the interesting, fascinating but also cruel 16th century, an age characterised by the hegemony of the Spanish empire over his island and over "the new world".

Language is the Truth is a book that will increase your interest for the vast and amazing world of languages, where each tongue plays an essential role for the spiritual, social and economic development of our planet thanks to the help that these priceless tools give us to understand ourselves and the others better as well as allowing us to preserve human diversity and freedom.

A special and interesting feature of this book consists in the presence of many short dialogues held in different languages such as Sardinian, Catalan, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian followed by the English translation. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Multilingualuigi
• Release date: Sep 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386964001

Book preview

SUPPORT MINORITY LANGUAGES

10 % of the revenue from this book is being donated to support minority languages-related projects worldwide. More info at efislivingtongue.com

Thank you very much for your priceless help.

PREFACE

Language is the Truth is a book that I wrote to pay a special homage to two inspiring passions of my life: Languages and the Island I was born in, Sardinia.

Although I was brought up mainly in Italian as most of the last Sardinian generations, during my childhood and my teenage I was surrounded by the real spoken soul of my birthplace, the Sardinian language, whose value and message has been ignored and rejected for the last six centuries, by colonialism first and by many Sardinians ourselves later, up to the present day.

I will spare you all the details about Sardinian, seeing that you will gradually discover plenty of them throughout this book, but I just want to say that, while I was writing some parts of Language is the Truth, I really felt that something special was leading the plot and the contents of this work. I strongly believe this guide was the Language that I could assimilate only passively and unconsciously in my early age and that, after two decades and after learning other five languages, knocked again on the door of my heart, this time looking for serious help as it finds itself on the brink of extinction.

In the main character of this book, Manuel, you will encounter several of those feelings that I had in the life-changing journey towards my linguistic roots.

Manuel is not only a simple semi-autobiographical character of myself, but he is also intended to represent those young Sardinian expats who, despite their talent and the potential of their own island, had and have to move north, in cosmopolitan cities where they will soon be confronted with the painful and contradictory detail of knowing and understanding the culture and the languages present in these international places better than the rich cultural and linguistic heritage of their own native land.

Manuel’s considerations and experiences will lead you through the many social-political challenges facing contemporary Europe such as terrorism, the economic crisis, the refugees and the Catalan crisis as well as the several issues affecting his own Mediterranean island while Luisu, the second main character of this novel, will let you travel back to the Sixteenth-century, where your breath will be taken away by his several adventures around a fascinating but also cruel, ancient world.

Furthermore, the intense poetic vein of both Manuel and Luisu will provide you not only with a detailed description of all the beautiful, various places where this novel is set, but also with an interesting overview of the numerous languages that will be spoken in the book.

In fact, the main aim of my first novel, Language is the Truth, is awakening, feeding the reader’s passion for these priceless spoken jewels and, at the same time, introducing him to the Sardinian language, the endangered linguistic soul of my Island that really needs your help to survive and fight the discrimination that had been facing for too many centuries.

Lastly, I wanted to inform you that I felt, designed and wrote this book mainly in foreign languages. I limited language revisions as I think that too many corrections would ruin the originality of this multilingual book, therefore I apologise in advance for any expressions that could sound weird to native speakers.

I would love to thank you in advance for taking some of your precious time to read this novel. Thank you very much indeed.

Efis Livingtongue

Acknowledgements

In addition to the main dedication you will find on the next page, I would like to say a special thank you to my soulmate for the love and the support she had been giving me along this project and along all the wonderful years we have been spending together.

Well, I’m eternally grateful for everything my family and my closest friends have been doing for me during the last three decades.

I would also like to thank those amazing people who helped me in this work through their priceless opinion and advice: Fàbiu Usala Friàrgiu, Enrico Lobina, Ivo Murgia, Istèvini Testa, Andrea Laterza, Stèvini Masia, Cristina Marras, Daniela Morgan, Elio Turno Arthemalle, Alessandro Pisano and Filippo Melis.

A very special thank you goes to all the members of the English Meetings Cagliari and Lìngua Bia associations.

Finally, I really want to express my gratitude to all the people who have been supporting the Multilingualuigi blogging project, where I try my best in valorising Sardinian through all the other languages I can speak, in the hope of convincing Sardinian and worldwide young generations to rescue the key of our identity, our language.

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction . Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and they have often been mixed up with fiction.

Main Dedication

For those who fought ,

fight and will be fighting

to save their endangered languages,

in Sardinia as in the whole World.

LANGUAGE IS THE TRUTH

CHAPTER 1

Heavy raindrops were falling down from the unsociable sky of a Berlin’s summer day, at the end of one of the rainiest Julys ever recorded in Germany.

I just got off working that day and I was on the way back to my flat. I got on the bus and I directly headed to the upper deck, taking caution of not falling down a slippery and steep stairway.

To be honest, I wasn’t in a very good mood as a permanent contract in a famous multinational was giving me neither the financial security nor the long-lasting happiness that both my parents and doubtful social beliefs had promised me.

I sat by the window and I tried looking through it, but the glass was too wet and clouded to see anything.

I simply logged on Facebook then, but even that didn’t cheer me up at all since my sad sunny soul couldn’t keep on looking at the countless summer beach-selfies taken by most of my Sardinian contacts.

"Was machst du denn hier?"

What are you doing here?

This was the most asked question I would get every time I would name the island I came from.

I used to look for a valid answer in grey days like that one, but nothing seemed to come out of my confused expat’s mind and not even out of Facebook.

I turned the mobile off and closed my tired eyes so that my overthinking brain could get lost in a deep breath, desirous of freedom. My bus-stop arrived, I stepped on a puddle and I completely got soaked from feet to hip.

Rusty keys hung gently from a Four Moors themed keyring and went through the old lock of a soviet surviving door. My flat welcomed me with its distinctive dusty smell and with a kitchen sink full of dirty unwashed dishes, left by some of my flatmates who, as opposite to me, were in their Berlin party years.

At home, there was only Daniele, an engineering student from Piedmont on his early twenties, who was taking advantage of his generous parents to enjoy his first international experience while pretending to be studying. Although he never did me anything wrong so far, there was some sort of feeling which kept me away from interacting with him, except from discussing the essential things regarding the flat sharing.

He was in the living room, watching some football highlights, with the mobile on the right side of the sofa and a rarely opened book on the left one.

"Ciao Manu, tutto bene?"

Hey Manu, how’s it going?

He asked me with a not very interested tone of voice, while his eyes met mine just for a quick moment before being magnetically attracted to the screen again, where a blond hair dyed Messi was causing the usual panic among hopeless defenders with trembling legs.

"Tutto a posto, grazie, e tu?"

"Everything alright, thanks, yourself?"

I answered and, mirroring the indifference, I went straight to my bedroom as Daniele’s "I’m good too" faded away through the emptiness of the corridor.

It was exactly 18.30, when the painful back of an average modern office-worker landed on my, far from comfortable, mattress.

It was clearly too early for sleeping, in fact that was the right time for practicing my greatest passion, learning languages. At this stage, I was a twenty-eight-old guy with no university degree on his hands but with almost five languages on his pockets.

In the previous ten years, I took many drastic decisions for following my linguistic inspiration. At the age of eighteen I left Italy, well...I mean...I left Sardinia for another similar proud stubborn and breathtaking island, where my wrists got under severe strain for drafting too much Guinness on bottomless glasses working in a pub in Temple Bar.

After a couple of years, a powerful desire for more sunrays brought me to Madrid, where I worked different Jobs, mostly in the hotel industry, where long working hours and short salaries got forgotten over legal and less legal vices.

At twenty-four, I decided, again, that it was time for a change and, taking advantage of a passing relationship, I ended up in another European but colder capital, with less sunny days and less solar locals but with better working conditions.

The years went by, in the same way as many habits and people did in my life, but, as opposite to that, my passion for languages stayed strong and even got stronger, taking up Portuguese too, this time without moving further, at least for the time being.

I spent the first hour reading through the Portuguese Assimil and then I switched to a couple of Babbel lessons. Being the language that I was learning after having learnt wearing German, Brazilian Portuguese would instead really come out of my grateful tongue in an incredible natural way and my nasal voice would feel like an ambitious actor getting the perfect character he’s always dreamt of.

"Mas com a chuvia não se vai a praia né?"

But with the rain you don’t go to the beach, right?

Came loudly from the language App.

"Aquì em Berlim tampouco sem chuvia se vai a praia né?"

Here in Berlin, you don’t go to the beach even without rain, right?

I said to myself while still regretting not to have gone back home for a visit that summer.

At around 8 P.M., a