Where the Sanna surname comes from
Sanna comes straight from the Sardinian language, where sanna means “tusk,” a big protruding tooth. According to the scholar Emidio De Felice, it began as a nickname. In the island’s villages, that’s what people called someone whose front teeth stuck out. Then the nickname passed to the children and became a surname. There are other, weaker leads too, and the PDF tells them.
A name almost a thousand years old
Sanna already appears in the medieval records of Sardinia, in the time of the four giudicati, the small kingdoms that ruled the island. The names of those centuries have come down to us thanks to very special registers, handwritten in the monasteries. The PDF explains what they are, and what they tell about the Sannas. Inside there is also the story of an eighteenth-century woman whose silk reached the court of a tsarina.
Where the Sannas live today
Sanna is the most common surname in all of Sardinia, and the most common in Sassari too. There are about 10,900 families in Italy. The peaks are in the Sassari area, in Cagliari and in the Campidano. The branches in Lazio, Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria almost always come from the emigration of the 1900s. Worldwide, almost all Sannas of Italian origin still live in Italy. The region-by-region map and the countries around the world where they settled are in the PDF.
FAQ
What does the surname Sanna mean?
In Sardinian, sanna means “tusk,” a big protruding tooth. It was the nickname of someone whose front teeth stuck out, and it later became a family name.
Is Sanna a Sardinian surname?
Yes, it is the Sardinian surname above all others. It is the top surname in all of Sardinia and in Sassari. Sanna families in the rest of Italy almost always left the island in the 1900s.
What is the most common surname in Sardinia?
Sanna. No other surname on the island is carried by so many families, and it is number one in the province and the city of Sassari as well.
How old is the Sanna surname?
Very old. It appears in the medieval records of Sardinia, in the time of the giudicati. In Sardinia the Sannas have carried the same surname for almost a thousand years.
Are all Sannas related?
No. The surname is so common that two Sanna families, unless they come from the same town, are almost never related. To rebuild your own story you need birth records and parish registers.
Is the Sanna surname noble?
The surname itself doesn’t mean nobility. It was born from a nickname among ordinary people, and almost no Sanna family ever had a coat of arms.
Is there a Sanna family coat of arms?
A few Sanna families may have had a seal of their own, but it belonged to that branch and that household. No single coat of arms belongs to every Sanna.
