Surnames of Sardinia

Sardinia’s surnames, people by people

More than three thousand years ago Sardinia was the land of the nuraghi, the dry-stone towers that still number in the thousands. Then came the Phoenicians, who founded Nora, Tharros and Karalis, today’s Cagliari, and for seven hundred years the Romans, who made the island one of Rome’s granaries. Their most lasting gift is the language: most of the island’s surnames come from Sardinian, which many linguists consider the Romance language closest to ancient Latin. Campus, for example, is still spelled the way the Romans spelled it.

In 534 Sardinia became part of the Byzantine Empire, and from Greek come Cherchi, the scribe, and Lampis, from Eulampios. Then the island split into four kingdoms, the Judicates, and in the condaghi, the monastery registers, people already have a surname, often the same one as today. The peace of 1388 between Eleonora’s Arborea and Aragon lists thousands of names, village by village. With Pisa and Genoa came merchants, notaries and craftsmen, and whoever came from Pisa became Pisanu; four centuries of Aragon and Spain left Piga, the freckle, and Masia, the farmstead. Corsican shepherds settled in Gallura, the House of Savoy brought Piedmontese officials, and Carloforte got the Tabarchini, Ligurian families who came from an island off Tunisia.

The volume gives a chapter to each of these ten peoples and stories, and for many of them it lists the surnames in the book that carry their mark.

How to recognize a Sardinian surname

Many Sardinian surnames are Sardinian words unchanged for almost a thousand years: Sanna is the tusk, Pinna the quill, Piras the pears, Casu the cheese, Frau the blacksmith. And some signs are easy to spot. The final -s of the Sardinian plural: Piras, Agus, Figus, Cannas. The diminutive in -eddu and -edda: Cadeddu, Pireddu, Piredda, Porcheddu. The attached De-, which shows where someone came from: Desogus, Delogu, Demontis. And the x, pronounced like the French j: Maxia, Lixi.

Then there’s the family nickname, which in many towns still passes from father to son without being written down anywhere. It’s the same mechanism that, centuries ago, gave birth to surnames.

Province by province

At the back of the volume an index gathers, province by province, the surnames that weigh most there: 295 surnames from the book, spread across the five provinces from Cagliari to South Sardinia. Then comes the list of the 122 Sardinian towns where a surname from the book is the most common: in Cagliari, for example, No. 1 is Melis, the honey surname.