Michel Contini (French: [miʃɛl kɔ̃tini]; Sardinian: Micheli Còntini [miˈkɛli ˈɣontini]; Italian: Michele Contini [miˈkɛːle ˈkɔntini]; born 1937[1]) is a Sardinian-born naturalized French linguist, researcher and academic.
[2] In 1958 he began living in Grenoble, France, where he graduated in Languages in 1964, obtaining the French citizenship in 1965.
Regarding Sardinian, his studies have come to analyze the variants of 214 Sardinian languages, and thanks to this work he obtained the State Doctorate (Strasbourg, 1983) with his thesis Étude de géographie phonétique et de phonétique instrumentale du sarde (Study of phonetic geography and instrumental phonetics of Sardinian), published in 1987 by the publisher Edizioni dell'Orso.
[3] Later, he became full professor of Geolinguistics and Phonetics and Director of the Center for Dialectology at the Stendhal University of Grenoble, and became director of the European Project for the Romance Linguistic Atlas of the State Mint and Polygraphic Institute of Rome, a collaborative project of 85 universities and 31 researchers from all over the Romance-speaking countries.
In 2006 he was part of the commission for the creation of the Limba Sarda Comuna, together with Giulio Angioni, Roberto Bolognesi, Manlio Brigaglia, Diego Corràine, Giovanni Lupinu, Anna Oppo, Giulio Paulis, Maria Teresa Pinna Catte and Mario Puddu, and since then he has always declared himself in favor of its use, considering the use of a single orthography tas something necessary to save the language from extinction.