​After more than two years away, on Friday, I was finally able to return to one of my favorite spots on Navajo Nation, the Window Rock Flea Market. Parking my truck in the dusty parking lot, I beelined to the food stands with my dog, Nira, I decided on the Grilled Food Café, where I ordered my favorite Diné (Navajo) dish of all time, “steam corn mutton stew,” also known as neeshjízhii. At the risk of unduly singling out any one vendor—all the vendors I have eaten at, there, and across Navajo Nation, also make delicious neeshjízhii, squash stew, and breakfast burritos with thick, homemade tortillas—I wanted to do a shoutout to this food stand in particular because they have just opened back up after the pandemic and because the proprietors are so explicit and intentional about the local value and craft of the food they make and sell.
 
Neeshjízhii is a Diné specialty food, and it is incredibly labor intensive to make. The corn, also called neeshjízhii, is smoky and complex, and has a slight hint of caramel after you bite into it (it’s similar to “chicos” in a New Mexican context). Making it takes several days, including harvesting the ears, steaming them on the cob in an earthen pit on cedar wood coals, shucking and drying the ears, and then removing the kernels from the cobs (southwest farmfresh.org). The corn is served in a simple broth with large chunks of mutton (dibé bitsį’ or sheep meat) on the bone, with salt as the only additional seasoning. It’s a deceptively simple meal, but don’t be fooled: paired with the grease and crunch of the frybread that comes on the side, it’s one of the most satisfying meals I’ve ever eaten (my friend refers to this stew as “Diné chapstick,” because it makes your lips greasy and shiny). 
 
The sign in the window of the Grilled Food Café reads:
 
“When you buy from a small mom & pop business, you are not helping a CEO buy a third vacation home. You are helping a little girl get dance lessons, a little boy get his team jersey, a mom put food on the table, a dad pay a mortgage, or a student pay for college. Our customers are our shareholders, and they are the ones we strive to make happy. Thank you for supporting small businesses!”

After I finished my meal, I wandered around to the other vendors, leaving with a couple small gifts for friends and some new (to me) Diné gospel CDs from a vendor who loves Diné gospel and country western bands. I chatted with George, a dapper 81 year old who bikes into “town” each day to check his mail and who worked for many years harvesting sugar beets on a farm in Idaho, before moving back home. I gassed up at Navajo Petroleum, bought a Navajo Times (the weekly paper for the Navajo Nation, out on Thursdays) with the front page featuring a performer from the most recent Navajo Pride parade, and headed back to Albuquerque, hands smelling faintly of mutton, accompanied by the songs of gospel singer Larry Kaibetoney on the stereo.
 
A bowl of neeshjízhii with frybread or tortilla (your choice) will set you back between $11.00-$12.00, or about ½ the price of a high end entrée at your favorite restaurant. But the richness of the flavor, the sensory experience and the stories that come with it are priceless. Wherever you are, please consider supporting unique, local and artisanal food trucks and foodways.
 
NB: If you make the trip, please know that masking and social distancing are still fully in effect, per Navajo Tribal Law, on the Navajo Nation. Most food stands, and other flea market vendors, prefer cash, only.
​

​So much has changed since March 3rd, 2020. On that day, I was set to embark on a solo songwriting tour in northern Italy, departing from the island of Sardinia in my grey Opel Corsa hatchback with my labrador, a guitar, and a bunch of sound gear. Together with my bookers, I hemmed and hawed, wondering if I should still head up to Lombardia, a province that later became a “red zone.” Less than one week later, on March 8th, the entire country went into a national lockdown due to the global pandemic, one that would last for months, and I’m grateful now that I decided not to go: me and my dog would surely have been stuck in the north, with no option to return to Sardinia, under a lockdown in unfamiliar territory with no anchor point.
 
But that thwarted tour left a space—a hunger, a craving—to travel, to share my music, and spend precious time with my dog, Nira, who is one of the great joys of my life. This is difficult to do safely in the midst of a global pandemic! And thus, “Me, My Dog and My Guitar, Take 2,” was born, the seed of an idea I hope to grow, nurture and cultivate over the next two months of winter lockdown in New Mexico, “wintering” as I have been alone inside the adobe walls of my Albuquerque casita. 
 

​The idea is this: travel, alone with my dog and my guitar, to a series of lesser-known National Parks and Monuments in southern Utah. I will hunker down for three weeks in a cabin, live in, near and among these parks, teach my classes remotely during the week as a professor at the University of New Mexico, and, on the weekends and evenings, spend as much time in the outdoors as possible, learning to read the light patterns, unique characteristics, smells, sounds and sights of that particular park. My partner, teaching overseas, has referred to this trip as my own desert solitaire. In many ways, I think he’s right. Right now, this solitary desert trip is the voyage I can do, and I’m not at all sure when I’ll have the luxury to do something like this, in the middle of a semester, again.
 
Normally, my inspiration for songs comes from people, cowrites, and daily interactions in the community I live in. These things, in my current universe, have all but disappeared for now: what happens if I turn my attention away from people and, in the spirit of socially-distanced artmaking, toward the exquisite beauty of the outdoors, instead? How might these parks speak to me, in the form of songs, stories, melodic fragments and poems, and how might I then share this place-inspired work with others? 

​As a former seasonal Park Ranger working in Parks on the Navajo Nation, I believe our National Parks are precious. I also know relatively little about the beautiful parks to the north and in Utah, specifically. So, this feels like an area in my own backyard, so to speak, that I’ve also undervalued. In addition, right now, our National Parks are under siege, financially, and many employees have been furloughed as a result of the pandemic. Bringing some visibility to these parks under duress, emphasizing and sharing that beauty with others, feels like it’s a small thing I can do in this moment where there is so, so much we cannot.
 
To be sure, there are also lots of fears. Will I be able to write, and the proverbial songwriter’s question: will I feel “inspired”? Will the self-isolation feel too intense? One way I will address this is through allowing myself to write unfinished songs, place-based fragments that are written in that place, and thus, are “done for now,” because they are a product of the place that inspired them. Thus, I am saying “yes” to what might not feel finished yet, to replenishing the artistic well for now, but also perhaps for later. It is a privilege to have the mental space to even consider such a journey, with so much in flux in so many American lives at this moment. This is a combined product of my own set of privilege, both inherited and bestowed after birth: my own economic and skin-color privilege, and the fact that I have a job with more geographic mobility than most. 

​This is the framework, and this is the journey. In my truck, with my dog and my guitar, I’ll be living this particular artistic question. Everything feels fragile, is fragile, and I want to honor that by being present in the best way I know how. I’ll be leaving on February 7th, and will remain in southern Utah, at the mouth of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and then at the entrance to Capital Reef National Park, for the remainder of the month. I will keep a daily journal, will be masked at all times, and will tread lightly. 
 

​Whether you know this part of the southwestern United States like the back of your hand, or whether you’ve never been to the US, I invite you to come, virtually, on my songwriter’s tour, where I’ll write songs instead of performing them, fed by the awe-inspiring natural beauty of America’s national parks: I’d be honored to share the journey with you.
 
~I have already had some precious interlocutors on this journey who I’d like to acknowledge at the outset, among them: John Parish, Gregg Daigle, Meredith Wilder, Raquel Rivera and Mary Roaf. Can’t wait, y’all!
 

​Nira Jacobsen, chocolate-colored Labrador Retriever, arrived in Sardegna on a steamy, humid day last September, via Los Angeles and Frankfurt, to Rome, where were took a ferry to Sardegna and where she accompanied me on my year of fieldwork here on the island, singing and writing songs, learning the Sardinian language, and generally taking part in the comings and goings of life, here.
 
Since then, we have been inseparable, and, although not part of the initial plan to have her here with me for the year, doing fieldwork with her in my midst has been much like the narratives I’ve read of doing fieldwork with a child in tow. Each Sunday, we’ve explored different beaches where she can swim and play ‘fetch,’ her favorite game and one of the main sources of work and reward (essential for a Labrador) in her life (the larger the stick/stimulus, the better). We’ve traveled on the train together, each week, in our commute from the rural village where I’ve been living to the city of Cagliari, where I was doing research at an Italian university, Nira nestled at my feet on her Italian-made cotton bed, curled into a small ball. We’ve hiked all over our village, greeting sheep, horses and cattle along the way.
 

​Nira’s presence has also summoned all sorts of perspectives and approaches to social life, to the human-animal interface, and to gender that are precious to me as I continue to learn more about this island, from the space of both the rural and the urban. For example, one of the most common questions I am asked when I am out walking with her in the city of Cagliari when someone is contemplating greeting her, or letting their dog greet her, is: “Femminuccia (Is she a girl)?” This question becomes code for “is she gentle?” and “does she bite?,” with the assumption being that in Sardegna, most male dogs are not neutered, and are thus perceived as being intrinsically territorial, aggressive or wanting to procreate and that, by inversion, female dogs, whether spayed or no, are going to be less aggressive, better behaved and generally more “gentile” (kind, nice, well-behaved). Thus, behavior and comportment become gendered in ways very different than they are in the U.S., where dog behavior is linked more to ideas of a dog’s training and history of aggression and less with its gender per se.

​In the rural village where I am living in the Sardinian foothills of the “Montiferru,” responses to Nira’s presence have also been strongly gendered, but in a different way. Men in general have responded positively, often wanting to get closer to her, sometimes pet her, and ask about her “qualifications,” for example, if she is “pure” bred and what kind of work she is bred to do. This is particularly true for the men we’ve met who do agricultural and pastoral work, such as work in the vineyards or those who work as shepherds, a common profession in a place where there are more sheep than people. When they learn she is a bird dog trained for hunting with a very delicate mouth built for fowl retrieval, she is met with approval, some additional pats on her head, comments about her physique, and a certain kind of respect. By contrast, many of the women in the village initially have expressed fear when meeting her, particularly based on her size (she is around 55 pounds, or 25 kilos). In both cases, here in the village dogs are perceived as being outdoor animals, and, my fantastic landlord notwithstanding, there is general incredulity surrounding the idea that a dog can be “house trained” or live inside a building.
​

​Over the weekend I developed a high fever due to a gas leak in my house. Worried about getting better as quickly as possible for a Northern Italian tour I was about to undertake (now sadly postponed due to the Corona Virus outbreak but taking place in January 2021), I went with a friend to the “Guardia Medica” in Cagliari.
 
This is a public service that’s offered to Italian citizens and tourists for health issues that aren’t life threatening, and thus don’t warrant an emergency room visit. We arrived around 8:00 pm, when the clinic opens for its night-time hours (it opens when normal doctor’s hours end), at a large three-story house, with a broken metal gate. We press the buzzer to be allowed in, but there’s no response. Five minutes later, we are issued in, the first patients of the evening for our blonde-haired, fifty-something doctor.
 

​I recognize quickly that doctor-patient protocol and privacy are quite different, here. We have most of our conversation in what looks like a small office—I don’t realize until later that it’s also the examining room—with the door wide open, as people shuffle in to get in line after us. When she finds out I’ve recently returned from the United Arab Emirates, she exits the room and returns with a face mask on, confiding in us that this is the first time she’s worn it to see a patient. I tell her I am honored—I’m not quite sure how else to respond to her confession—and she raises my T-Shirt and proceeds to palpate my back and chest with her stethoscope, asking me to pant quickly in and out, “come un cane” (like a dog), for around 60 seconds, as my friend looks on in amusement and I do my best not to start giggling. She has me open my mouth and lower my tongue. Assured it’s not Corona Virus, she asks for my “tessera sanitaria” (a sort of Italian social security card), proscribes me a cough suppressant called “Seki” on a torn piece of white paper (the printer is jammed), writes the word “tiket sanitario” (health ticket) and the day and month but no year. She is wearing a white coat, but there is no medical equipment in the room that I can see beyond the stethoscope: no sink, no rubber gloves, no computer, and the entire exam is done with me seated on the metal chair I sat on when I entered. 

​She then proceeds to the topic du jour, immigration, noting that the United States has just closed its doors to flights from China, South Korea, and now Italy. My friend, eager to balance the playing field on my behalf, notes that Italy has long closed its doors to many migrants themselves, including the many boats of North African migrants who have been refused a port of entry on Italian waters in recent months. The doctor then responds, “and look where our open border policies have gotten us now,” giving a knowing nod and a wary eye roll to indicate she’s talking about Corona Virus. My friend counters that, in fact, none of the known cases of Corona Virus have come from “l’Africa” and that, on the contrary, they are mostly from wealthier Italians who have the means to travel abroad and then carried inadvertently carried the virus home with them. The conversation continues, both firm in their positions, smiling brightly, and neither willing to cede.

​I am a bit dumbfounded, and my head is spinning. What has just happened, and is the person we saw actually a doctor? Since they didn’t take my temperature, can they really know I’m well? Is the torn piece of paper really a prescription, and is that seen as legitimate by a licensed pharmacist? Is it typical protocol to talk to a patient with an open door and then to discuss immigration policy and politics? On the flip side, is it possible that one can actually get seen and diagnosed, so quickly without an appointment and with such efficiency, despite the obvious lack of infrastructure and resources? And how could an entire appointment, not logged into any computer system I could see, only cost 16.00 €, and a prescription only 5.40 €, given to a foreign national using no insurance in this case?
 
What I loved about this experience was its imperfectness, its lack of tidiness, its messiness. What I also loved was that, despite that, and the old building, and the gate that didn’t work, and the exam rooms that look like an old library from the 1950s, someone was willing to see me, treat  me, and offer a bit of medical advice, and that they had no qualms about offering me other sorts of opinions on politics, as well. The latter, of course, is a very Italian thing—I am offered strongly opined unsolicited advice almost every day I live on Sardinian (also arguably Italian) soil—but in a funny way this is also oddly humanizing. I know where she stands, she knows where I  and my friend stand, she wasn’t worried about a medical malpractice suit if she expressed her opinions or offered me somewhat haphazard care; that’s the space she was in at at 8:10 yesterday evening, and that’s what she had to offer me, her first patient of the evening.
 
I have now, with the help of my friend, gone down the bureaucratic road of paying my 16.00 € (about a two hour process), and, in the meantime, will enjoy a good dose of vitamin C through one of my favorite local sources, Italian blood orange juice (amazing). Buona giornata, tutti, e buon proseguimento.

Click here Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. For Valentine’s Day weekend, I traveled with my partner and his daughter from Abu Dhabi into the heart of the Musandam Peninsula, a piece of land which juts into the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow entry into the Persian Gulf. After an exquisite lunch of Arabian salad, fresh hummus/pita and mint tea at a Lebanese restaurant in Fajairah, we head to our destination for the night, a farm house we are renting from an Emirati couple in the village of Al Taiba, outside the town of Musafi. 
 
We drive into the old part of the village, winding slowly down into what appears to be a verdant river valley, and stop at the house, recognizing the face of Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (otherwise known as Sheikh Zayed, the founder and first President of the UAE) on stencilled onto the side of the house. We climb out of our little red Ford Spark, and are immediately greeted by our hosts, Hajer and Waliid, who present us with purple jasmine flowers as a welcome. Hajer works in the office of UAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum(son to Sheikh Zayed), and Waliid is an engineer working for the United Arab Emirates Air Force in Dubai.
 
Waliid and Hajer show us the farmhouse. It’s stunning, and huge. There is a private walled courtyard with bougainvillea, a large room with thirty foot ceilings and ornately decorated couches and carpets, two bedrooms, and two bathrooms. There is a rooftop terrace, with more brightly colored couches and carpets, from which we can see the rest of the old village and hear an exquisite evening call to prayer that richochets around the canyon (you can listen to a snippet, here). to edit.

​Hajer and Waliid then show us the “farm,” an adjacent property also a tour disposal, a patch of date palms and vegetables hooked up to an irrigation system that features another large covered seating area with more beautiful patterned couches, carpets, another gorgeous view, and a cozy nook to hold a cup of tea.

​Hajer and Waliid are in their mid-thirties. Reared in the village but now living with their three children in Dubai, they have also started their own modest museum of sorts, featuring an old fort (what they call the “flag fort”) belonging to their family and photos of all the Emirati notables who have come to visit this, their family home in the countryside. Waliid then walks us around the old village, to a farm-turned-museum, introducing us to the museum director and asking me to play on some of the instruments in the display case (an ‘oud and a vertically played wooden flute with a fipple like a recorder). We are offered water by the museum director, are shown another room of photos of Emirati notables and a room of photos dedicated to Sheikh Zayed, and then Waliid takes us on a walk in the creek bed to point out different hiking path options for the following morning. In his white kandura and sandals, he dashes up creek banks, finds alternate paths, and runs around with the energy of someone half his age. His love for this place is abundant and clear. He photographs us inside the area of his granfather’s old conveniene store, now closed, endearingly uses the the term “never mind” each time he seems to mean “don’t worry,” to hilarious misinterpretations on our part, and we head back to the house on our own.
 
We have a catered Emirati meal on the rooftop, featuring a ground rice puree with cinnamon oil called Oursia, spiced vegetables (Therid) and a variety of seasoned legumes, ending the meal with a sweet fried dumpling (laqaimat), made from saffron, flour and sugar, and covered in sesame seeds and date syrup. We doze off, stuffed, watching National Geographic in Arabic, snuggled in thick, white blankets that are exquisitely thick and soft.

​In the morning, we hike down into the canyon, passing multiple gated farm compounds, which, for those receiving irrigation, appear as mini oases in this mountainous desert landscape. On the way back, a man supervising a front-end loader in the canyon motions to us, asking us to wait. We momentarily worry we might have done something to offend. A few minutes later, two Pakistani men who work for him appear, holding small, round apple-like fruits in their hands, offering them to us as a welcome. They’re sweet, a little bit tart, and the fruit pulp thickens a bit in your mouth as you chew them (we add them, thinly sliced, to a green salad last night).

​As we get ready to leave the house and head back to Abu Dhabi, Waliid and Hajer show up, a large coffee caraffe filled with karak, a black tea made with Rainbow sweetened condensed milk infused with cardamom, in hand. They offer us steaming cups, and ask us to sign a lock, as their first guests in their house, which they will symbolically affix to a link in their fence and to which they give us the key to take with us. We sign their lock, and they sign our key as a memento of this place. They talk more about their desire to re-infuse the older part of their village with life and economic development, and wonder about the current government focus on putting money only into building large houses in the newer part of town and into developing the major cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, while their village gets left behind. They want this farm house, which they’ve recently completely renovated over the last year, to be a starting point for that reclamation of history and of the past.
 
They show us the back area behind the farmhouse, which features two more modest houses. The smallest house, a single room built by Waliid’s family in the 1950s, housed ten family members. Another house, built thirty years later, is about the size of an American style ranch house. I am struck by how Waliid and Hajer, in a country so focused on growth and size as a measure of modernity and success, are doing just the opposite: going back, one stone and one fort at a time, to preserve what came before the UAE was formed, in 1971, and before oil and gas revenues set their country on a path of unequaled prosperity. For them, their is enormous value in the past, and in sharing that with others.
 
*To learn more about this place/bed and breakfast, you can look for “flagfort” on Instagram, or Al Qalaa Lodge on air bnb.****

 This past week has been rich and full, and I’ve been so busy studying, learning and trying to more actively speak in Sardu, there’s actually been very little time to write and reflect! I’ve also been busy planning music tours—a solo one I’ll do in northern Italy, and one with the band in Sardegna—will hope, in future posts, to have a chance to talk about the many ways the tours also interface with Sardinian language politics!
 
So here I am, back on the bandwagon. In the meantime, thank you to each of you—friends, family, colleagues and classmates—for your messages, emails and feedback on the pieces posted thus far—it’s been very inspiring/motivating to receive them, so please, keep them coming!
 
In an effort to peel back the curtain on my own language learning process—like mastering a cd, it often is presented as a sort of “black box,” in my experience—here is a daily look at what my language learning process is looking like:
 
Early a.m.: wake up, read over notes/new vocabulary from day before (classes, conversations, things 
I’ve read) and record my voice reading these new words into my “recording” app on my phone
 
Take dog for walk, listening to these recordings through my headphones and repeating them, out 
loud, as I walk down the main walking street in Cagliari (via Manno/via Garibaldi); return to apartment.
 
Mid-morning: exit my apartment and seek out language speaking situations (barista up in the Castello, 
friends from my Campidanese class, phone conversations)
 
Early afternoon: do homework given to me by my teachers/work on more memorization
 
Late afternoon/early evening: attend one of my classes in Campidanese (the second one starts next week), or attend private language lesson in Santu Lussurgiu in the Lussorzesu version of Logudorese (technically a mix of Campidanese and Logudorese, called Arborense). All of these lessons are also recorded on my phone, for later playback.
 
In my lessons in this past week, and in order to have a more concrete sense of the distinction between the two principal variations of the Sardinian language, I’ve focused on learning a simple language introduction, for social and professional settings, but also for when I’m on stage in Sardegna, in both Logudorese and Campidanese. It’s been clarifying on a number of levels, for things from pronunciation (“s” versus “z”, for example) to word endings (“o” or “u”, for example), to intonation and phraseology. Overall, Campidanese, with its nasals and more open vowels, feels a little more comfortable for me and more colloquial overall; Logudorese, for me, takes a bit more effort and feels more controlled when I speak it. As my teacher of Logudorese would say, Logudorese is “sweeter” and a bit more “delicate” in the approach we need to use to speaking it.
 
So you can see the visual comparison (and also see how close both languages are to Latin and how much Spanish is also present!), here are the written introductions I’ve come up with in working with my teachers. As you’ll see, they are not exact carbon copies of one another—my vocabulary is limited enough that I can’t simply replace one word for another, just yet—but there are a number of similarities in the vocabulary used, so you can compare them against one another.
 
Campidanese:
 
Saludi totus. A mei mi nant Kristina. Bivo in Casteddu—Stampaxi—et Santu Lussurzu puru, peró seu nascia in Massachusetts e seu Americana. Seu una professora e imparu antropologia et etnomusicologia. A me mi praxit imparai su Sardu et is fuedus. Sonu sa chitarra e mi praxit a cantai; seu cantautora e seu cuntenta mera de essere qua [last two words are in Italian].
 
[English Translation: Hello to everyone. My name is Kristina. I live in Cagliari—in the neighborhood called Stampace—and also in the village of Santu Lussurgiu, but I was born in Massachusetts and I am American. I am a professor and I teach anthropology and ethnomusicology. I like learning the Sardinian language and other languages. I play the guitar and I like to sing; I’m a singer-songwriter and I’m very happy to be here with you].
 
Here is the recording to accompany the introduction, above:
 
Logudorese (meridionale):
 
Salude. Mi naro Kristina, e seo Americana. Bivo in Casteddu et in Santu Lussurzu. Imparo a sos istudentes antropologia et etnomusicologia. Mi agradat a imparare sa limba Sarda et sas limbas istranzas de tantos logos de su munnu. Seo naschida in Massachusetts, sono sa chitarra, e canto sas canzones inventadas de me.
 
[English translation: Hello. My name is Kristina, and I am American. I live in Cagliari and in Santu Lussurgiu. I teach anthropology and ethnomusicology to college students. I like learning the Sardinian language and foreign languages from all over the world. I was born in Massachusetts, I play the guitar, and I sing songs that were written by me.]
 
And here is the recording to accompany the introduction, above:
 
Last but not least—and the icing on the cake, as far as I’m concerned--here is a recording of my amazing language teacher from Santu Lussugriu reading the exact same text, above, as she gesticulates and mimes the words of the introduction to make it come alive (you can hear my laughing at her antics in the background). She is one of the most gregarious, generous and engaging human I know.
 
So: what do you all hear in each of these recordings, and what are the primary differences to your ears?
 
Challenges
Code-switching between one place (the village) and another (the city), and reminding myself which variant to use, where, has begun to be challenging. For example, the word for “much/a lot” (Italian=molto) is “meda” in Logudorese, and “mera” in Campidanese. I accidentally used “mera” during my lesson on Thursday in the village, which caused much laughter on the part of my teacher, who generously promised me she wouldn’t let the slip-up leave her house (i.e., she wouldn’t let anyone else in the village know I am learning Campidanese, since she knows it would sonically “mark” me). Another challenge I’m finding is the switch between the “seu” (I am) of Campidanese—open vowel on “e” sound, ends in a closed “u” sound, with the “s” sound more like a “z” in English—and the “seo” of Logudorese, which the “s” is softer and more sibilant, the “e” sound is closed not open, and the final vowel is an “o,” not a “u.”
 
Another challenge I’m having this week is finding the time every day to listen to hours and hours—in this case, between 6-8 hours each week—of recorded language classes and then writing down the additional vocabulary from these lessons. My modus operandi so far is lots and lots of dog walks—thank goodness my exquisite brown Labrador is here with me in Sardinia!—but, since my phone doesn’t get service in my subterranean apartment, this is also my phone call time with friends and loved ones, so it’s directly cut into that and I’m mindful of trying to keep a balance between the two. of course, I’m walking around in this beautiful city, and don’t want to always be the person with her headphones on, tuning the world out in order to tune into Sardinian! So, your best brain storming language learning tips are always welcome. 
 
Other things you’ll see and hear:
After each verb ending in a “t” (indicates 3rd person singular), you’ll often hear an extra vowel added to the end of the word that’s not actually written. It’s always a repetition of the written vowel sound that came before—for example, “agradat” sound like “agradata”—and it seems to be always an unstressed vowel. This is called “paragogica,” and occurs consistently after verb conjugations ending in “t” and at the end of plural nouns ending in “s” (you hear it hear in the Logudorese recording in the word “estranzas,” so that it sounds like “estranzasa.” You’ll also hear the beautiful mellifluousness of my teacher’s voice, in contrast to my own more halting rendition.
 
Questions to ponder: to your ears, how different do these two versions sound to one another? Although most Sardinian speakers I know have the ability to speak one and at least understand the other, the ideologies of difference surrounding who speaks which are amazing different.
 
‘til the next time, and I’ll look forward to hearing from you.
 
And, below, are possible future posts, based on feedback I’ve received from readers thus far: 
 
~learning languages in minoritarian language contexts: why do it, what do you get from it, and what is the motivation (Arrayan)
 
~Sardinian in urban language settings such as Cagliari and Sassari: what is the language reclamation scene like in the city, and what is the experience for Sardinians those learning Sardinian as a completely “foreign” language (Nike)
 

When I arrived in Santu Lussurgiu in July, I kept having this funny question gnaw at me: is Sardinian my language to learn? Is it appropriate for a woman, in a rural village, to be actively speaking and learning Sardu?
 
This question stemmed from a few different experiences and things I’d noticed. First, Sardinian in public spaces in the village is spoken almost entirely by men and by the elderly. So, I was hearing it as a generational and men’s language and it was difficult to imagine what it might sound like in my own voice. Second, in many public spaces in rural Sardinia, there is still a profound division of gender, with men congregating with one another at one table or in one corner of the bar, and women, if they are present, in another. Most importantly, in these public spaces, while men and many teenagers are talking to each other in Sardu, women are talking to each other almost exclusively in Italian, and they are also talking to their children in Italian. While some of these decisions, in the private space of the home, could look and be very different, based on folks forty and younger I’ve talked to, most will say that in their homes growing up, their mothers spoke to them in Italian, and their fathers spoke to them in Sardu (the exception is families where parents didn’t know or spoke very limited Italian). But even this has a gendered variation, where sometimes the father will talk to their sons in Sardu, but to their daughters in Italian.
 
So, in the village, I’d need to actively defy this social order in order to practice basic conversation with other men, mostly older than me, in the bar at night, by myself, in order to achieve this goal. The few times I did it, despite the hospitality of residents of this village in general, it felt precarious, and like I’d made myself too vulnerable in a way that didn’t feel sustainable. This was exacerbated by the fact that I live alone and everyone knows my house—it’s at the very beginning of the carnival horse race for which Santu Lussurgiu is famous—my house number, my comings and goings, and my dog. So remaining anonymous in any sense in Santu Lussurgiu isn’t really an option.
 
Much of this changed when I started working with my Sardinian language teacher in the village, a poet, short-story writer, Sardinian language advocate and retired school teacher, since I now have a highly skilled speaker who is also a woman with whom I can consistently speak. But, seven months later, she is still the only women in the village with whom I speak in Sardu, and so the question for me remains: what are the gender dynamics and the politics of respectability and upward mobility behind these language politics, and what does it mean that so many women, despite many believing in the importance of transmitting Sardinian to their children, are choosing to speak to each other and their children in Italian?
 
By contrast, here in Cagliari, where Sardinian on the street is barely heard, in the immersion-style language classes I’m taking with an immense range of speaking abilities, Sardinian feels much less gendered and the class is skewed about 2/3rds female and 1/3 male. And there are very skilled female teachers and speakers closer to my age, who role model for me what my identity, and my voice, might sound like when I am speaking in this language. So, for this next month and for this immersion process, I’ve decided to live in the place where, ironically, much less Sardinian is spoken but where I feel more confident speaking, experimenting, and trying this beautiful new language on for size.
 
I’ll leave you with the song that was my soundtrack for the day, yesterday, shared with me by a new friend. It’s by a Sardinian Heavy/Black/Viking metal band called “Shardana,” and the title, “Sa Batalla,” translates to “The Battle.”
 
The lyrics of the song are in Campidanese, and refer to an important period in Sardinian 
history when Sardinia was sovereign and self-governing under Judge William III (1256-1258):
 
Here are the words to the first verse:
 
Eccu su tristu dii 
Candu is sadrus unìusu anti perdiusu 
Gullielmu III guìdara su populu 
Po unu destinu de carenasa….