The adult male has a grey back, whitish underparts, black head, white throat and red eyes.

Plumages are somewhat variable even in the same locality, with the intensity of a reddish hue on upper- and/or underside that varies from absent to (in some subspecies) pronounced.

The Sardinian warbler was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[2][3] Gmelin based his entry on a description by the Italian zoologist Francesco Cetti in his book Gli uccelli di Sardegna (The Birds of Sardinia) that was published in 1776.

[4] When a translation of Cetti's three volumes were published in German, the translator, David Piesch, and the editor, Nathanael Gottfried Leske, included an Appendix at the end of the third volume (published in 1784) in which they proposed the binomial name Motacilla melanocephala, the identical name that was later adopted by Gmelin.

Both have white malar areas and light throats, and otherwise black heads in adult males, as well as a naked ring around the eye.