Sardinian surnames are the surnames held by the 1.6 million or so people who live on the island of Sardinia in Italy, as well as elements of the Italian diaspora in countries like the United States and Argentina who trace their ancestry back to Sardinia. Sardinian surnames are quite distinctive from those found in other parts of mainland Italy. This is in part owing to the fact that linguistically Sard or Sardinian, a Romance language which has remained prominent on the island, is the closest of any Romance language to the Latin of the Romans. Like any regional dialect, this has impacted on the way Sardinian surnames are structured and spelled. It has resulted in a series of surnames becoming quite prominent on the island which are quite distinctive from the surnames found in most other regions of Italy.
History of Sardinian surnames
The history of Sardinian surnames is quite complex and involves both lingual nuances and the vagaries of political and social history. On the one hand, they are partially the product of the Sardinian language or Sard. Like most other Western European languages, this is a Roman language derived from Latin. It is understood by linguists to be the Romance language which was closest to the Latin of the Romans, unlike languages like French or Castilian, which are derived from the Vulgar Latin spoken by the Germanic tribes-people who settled across the region in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries CE. This Sardinian language thrived through the Middle Ages and impacted on the development of Sardinian surnames during the formative period of them in the High Middle Ages and late medieval period.[1]
The other major factor at work in the formation of Sardinian surnames was the imposition of external influences. Around the time that surnames were developing across Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, several powers were trying to secure control of the island of Sardinia. In the earlier period, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, various states on the Italian mainland, including the Papacy and the Republic of Pisa in Tuscany, acquired control over parts of Sardinia insuring that mainland Italian lingual and surname practices were transplanted here to some extent. Then, beginning in the late thirteenth century, the Kingdom of Aragon, which was centered on Catalonia in Spain, began acquiring an interest in Sardinia, eventually coming to control the entire island as part of its growing dominance of the islands of the Western Mediterranean. King James II of Aragon completed the conquest of the island by 1324.[2]
Thereafter Sardinian would experience different periods of dominance by the Aragonese, a united Spain from the late fifteenth century onwards and finally the House of Savoy based out of the Piedmont in north-western Italy from the early eighteenth century, before becoming a part of a united Italy following the Risorgimento of the mid-nineteenth century. All of this left traces in the surname landscape and Sardinian surnames have been influenced by Spanish naming conventions to some extent.[3]
Sardinian naming convention
Sardinian naming conventions have been influenced by these historical and lingual developments. Many of the most common Sardinian surnames are not found widely elsewhere in peninsular Italy. Instead they are specific to the island and are the products of the Sardinian language. Others also show the traces of centuries of Spanish and Catalan rule here at a formative stage in surname development during the late medieval era. The most striking feature of all of this is that an unusually large number of Sardinian surnames end in ‘s’ or ‘a’, in contrast to Italian surnames in most other places which tend to end more in ‘i’ and ‘o’ to a much greater extent. One of the reasons for this is that Sard uses ‘s’ at the end of plural words, whereas most other Italian dialects use ‘i’. These tendencies were exacerbated by the fact that the Sardinian language remained dominant across large stretches of the island until the eighteenth century and even then continued to be spoken by a large percentage of the population into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[4]
Most popular Sardinian surnames
Precise details concerning the most common Sardinian surnames in individual parts of the island are available. The most popular Sardinian surnames in the largest city, Cagliari, and the surrounding region in the south of the island tend to be:
The most common surnames in the Nuoro region on the eastern side of the island are:
The most common surnames in the Oristano region on the western side of Sardinia are:
Finally, the most common surnames in the province of Sassari in the north of Sardinia are:
The meanings of some of these popular Sardinian surnames are not 100% certain. For instance, Sanna may be derived from ‘saint’ and could have evolved from an ancestor being deemed particularly religious or having been a cleric of some kind. Other interpretations claim it emerged as a nickname to describe someone with prominent teeth. Pinna derives from the Sardinian word for ‘nostrils’, suggesting this was another descriptive surname used to describe someone with a large nose. Manca evolved as a descriptor surname to describe someone who was left-handed. Hence, Sardinian surnames are somewhat unusual in that descriptor surnames, rather than occupational or patronymic surnames, are especially common.[5]
Famous Sardinians
- Augusto Bissiri – From Seui in Sardinia, Bissiri was a prolific inventor who carried out important work in the spheres of railway design and cameras and pioneered some of the technology used to transmit images that would be necessary for televisions to be later invented.[6]
- Grazia Deledda – Hailing from Nuoro in Sardinia, Deledda was a writer, playwright and poet who won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1926.[7]
- Pier Angeli – Born Anna Maria Pierangeli, Pier Angeli was the stage name of this actress, model and singer from Cagliari, the primary city of Sardinia. She was in a relationship with James Dean in the 1950s and never recovered emotionally from his premature death, dying of a barbiturate overdose in 1971. She won a Golden Globe in 1951.[8]
- Giorgia Meloni – The Prime Minister of Italy since 2022. Though born in Rome herself, she holds one of the most common Sardinian surnames and her maternal grandfather, Nino Meloni, was from Sardinia.[9]
See also
Explore more about Sardinian surnames
- Italy, Births and Baptisms, 1806-1900 record collection on MyHeritage
- Italy, Marriages, 1809-1900 record collection on MyHeritage
- Italy Deaths and Burials, 1809-1900 record collection on MyHeritage
- Italians Immigrating to the United States record collection on MyHeritage
- La Madre Chiesa – Italian Catholic Parish Records at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Bruno Migliorini, ‘Language (Including Sardinian and Ladin)’, in The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 22 (1960), pp. 241–246.
- ↑ Laura Galoppini, ‘Overview of Sardinian History (500–1500)’, in Michelle Hobart (ed.), A Companion to Sardinian History, 500–1500 (Leiden, 2017), pp. 85–114.
- ↑ Christopher Storrs, War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, 1690–1720 (Cambridge, 1999).
- ↑ Guido Mensching and Eva-Maria Remberger, ‘Sardinian’, in Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (Oxford, 2016), pp. 270–291.
- ↑ https://www.italyheritage.com/genealogy/surnames/regions/sardegna/
- ↑ Jeff Biggers, In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy (New York, 2023), pp. 120–121.
- ↑ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1926/deledda/facts/
- ↑ https://www.vogue.com/article/james-dean-anna-maria-pierangeli-love-story
- ↑ Giorgia Meloni: From student politics to opposing same-sex marriage, know journey of Italy’s PM. Financial Times