The oldest written attestation of the ethnonym is on the Nora stone, where the word Šrdn (Shardan[21]) bears witness to its original existence by the time the Phoenician merchants first arrived on Sardinian shores.

[19] According to Timaeus, one of Plato's dialogues, Sardinia and its people as well, the "Sardonioi" or "Sardianoi" (Σαρδονιοί or Σαρδιανοί), might have been named after "Sardò"[19] (Σαρδώ), a legendary Lydian woman from Sardis (Σάρδεις), in the region of western Anatolia (now Turkey).

[46] In the Late Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age, the Bell Beaker culture from Southern France, Northeastern Spain, and then Central Europe[48] entered the island, bringing new metallurgical techniques and ceramic styles and probably Indo-European languages.

[52] Although the Sardinians were considered to have acquired a sense of national identity,[53] at that time, the grand tribal identities of the Nuragic Sardinians were said to be three (roughly from the South to the North): the Iolei/Ilienses, inhabiting the area from the southernmost plains to the mountainous zone of eastern Sardinia (later part of what would be called by the Romans Barbaria);[54][55] the Balares, living in the North-West corner;[56] and finally the Corsi stationed in today's Gallura and the island to which they gave the name, Corsica.

[15][65][66] Even from the former Sardo-Carthaginian settlements, with which the Sardinian mountaineers had formed an alliance in a common struggle against the Romans,[67] indigenous attempts emerged aimed at resisting cultural and political assimilation: inscriptions in Bithia dating to the period of Marcus Aurelius were found, and they still followed the old Punic script at a time when even in North Africa the script was neo-Punic;[68] Punic-style magistrates called sufetes wielded local control in Nora and Tharros through the end of the first century B.C., although two sufetes existed in Bithia as late as the mid-second century CE.

[70] The Italic immigrants were confronted with a difficult coexistence with the natives,[71] who were reluctant to assimilate to the language and customs of the colonists; many aspects of the ancient Sardo-Punic culture are documented to have persisted well into Imperial times, and the mostly mountainous innerlands came to earn the name of Barbaria ("Land of the Barbarians", similar in origin to the word Barbary) as a testament of the fiercely independent spirit of the tribes who dwelled therein (in fact, they would continue to practice their indigenous prehistoric religion up until the age of Pope Gregory I).

The prefects sent [into Sardinia] sometimes resist them, but at other times leave them alone, since it would cost too dear to maintain an army always on foot in an unhealthy place.Like any other subjects of the Empire, Sardinians too would be granted Roman citizenship in 212 AD with the Constitutio Antoniniana by Caracalla.

[92][93] According to an 1882 census realised by the French engineer Leon Goüine, 10,000 miners worked in the south-western Sardinian mines, one third of whom being from the Italian mainland;[94] most of them settled in Iglesias and frazioni .

At the end of the 19th century, communities of fishermen from Sicily, Torre del Greco (Campania) and Ponza (Lazio) migrated on the east coasts of the island, in the towns of Arbatax/Tortolì, Siniscola and La Maddalena.

[95] A central government policy would change this situation in the following years,[95] which saw an immigration flow from the Italian peninsula: the Fascist regime resettled to Sardinia a considerable number of miners and peasants from a wide variety of regions like Veneto, Marche, Abruzzo and Sicily, who were encouraged to populate the new mining town of Carbonia, or agrarian villages like Mussolinia di Sardegna ("Sardinia's Mussolinia", now Arborea) and Fertilia; after World War II, Italian refugees from the Istrian–Dalmatian exodus were relocated in the Nurra region, along the north-western coastline.

As a result of the city's originally diverse composition, Carbonia developed a variety of Italian with some Sardinian influences from the neighbouring areas, while the other mainland coloni ("colonists") establishing minor centres kept their dialects of Istriot, Venetian and Friulan, which are still spoken by the elderly.

[97] Following the Italian economic miracle, a historic migratory movement from the inland to the coastal and urban areas of Cagliari, Sassari-Alghero-Porto Torres and Olbia, where today most Sardinians live, took place.

In fact, contrary to the general trend, from the late Middle Ages until the 20th century urban settlement has not taken place primarily along the coast but towards the centre of the island.

Historical reasons for this include the repeated Moorish raids which made the coast unsafe, the abandonment of hundreds of settlements following the Sardinian–Aragonese war and the swampy nature of the coastal plains that were reclaimed only in the 20th century.

[99] The situation has been recently reversed with the expansion of the industrialization and seaside tourism; today all Sardinia's major urban centres are located near the coast, while the island's interior is very sparsely populated.

[122] Small communities with Sardinians ancestors, about 5000 people, are also found in Brazil (mostly in the cities of Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo),[123] the UK, and Australia.

or from a person's occupation, nickname[136] (e.g. Pittau "Sebastian"[137]), distinctive trait (e.g. Mannu "big"), and filiation (last names ending in -eddu which could stand for "son of", e.g. Corbeddu "son/daughter of Corbu"[137]); a number of them have undergone Italianization over the most recent centuries (e.g. Pintori, Scano, Zanfarino, Spano, etc.).

Therefore, Sardinian is facing challenges analogous to other definitely endangered minority languages across Europe,[177] and its two main Logudorese and Campidanese varieties, as defined by their standard orthographies, have been designated as such by UNESCO.

[181] These languages include Sassarese (sassaresu) and Gallurese (gadduresu), which are of remote Corso-Tuscan origin but often socially associated with Sardinian,[182][183] Algherese Catalan (alguerés), and Ligurian Tabarchino (tabarchin).

In popular traditions, beliefs and rites of pre-Christian origin, which have evolved symbiotically with Christianity, have survived until the contemporary era, for example the day of Su mortu mortu or "the dead dead" (2 November, All Souls' Day), the Sardinian equivalent to Halloween, when children go from house to house asking for small donations to feed the deceased (traditionally seasonal fruits, dried fruit, sweets, bread).

[191] Colourful and of various and original forms, the Sardinian traditional clothes are an ancient symbol of belonging to specific collective identities, as well as one of the most genuine ethnic expressions of the Mediterranean folklore.

The Sardinians' traditional garments, as well as their jewellery,[193] have been defined as an object of study in ethnography since the late 19th century,[194] at a time in which they first started to be slowly displaced in favour of the "Continental fashion" in the various contexts of everyday life, and their primary function has since switched to become a marker of ethnic identity.

[195][196] In the past, the clothes diversified themselves even within the communities, performing a specific function of communication as it made it immediately clear the marital status and the role of each member in the social area.

The various components of the feminine apparel are: the headgear (mucadore), the shirt (camisa), the bodice (palas, cossu), the jacket (coritu, gipone), the skirt (unnedda, sauciu), the apron (farda, antalena, defentale).

Studies analyzing the DNA of both ancient and modern individuals from the island confirm that the current population is mainly (50% or more[44]) derived from the prehistoric settlers (mostly Early Neolithic Farmers and to a lesser degree Western Hunter-Gatherers with few Bronze Age individuals showing evidences of Western Steppe Herder ancestry[50]), plus some contribution of the historical colonizers, with the highest Neolithic and Mesolithic ancestry being found in the mountainous region of Ogliastra.