Sardinians
Sardinians or Sards are an ethnolinguistic group of Italy indigenous to Sardinia, an island in the western Mediterranean which is administratively an autonomous region of Italy.
Etymology
Not much can be gathered from the classical literature about the origins of the Sardinian people. The ethnonym "Srd" may belong to the Pre-Indo-European linguistic substratum, and whilst they might have derived from the Iberians, the accounts of the old authors differ greatly in this respect. The oldest written attestation of the ethnonym is on the Nora stone, where the word Šrdn bears witness to its original existence by the time the Phoenician merchants first arrived on Sardinian shores.According to Timaeus, one of Plato's dialogues, Sardinia and its people as well, the "Sardonioi" or "Sardianoi", might have been named after "Sardò", a legendary Lydian woman from Sardis, in the region of western Anatolia.
Some other authors, like Pausanias and Sallust, reported instead that the Sardinians traced their descent back to a mythical ancestor, a Libyan son of Hercules or Makeris revered as a deity going by Sardus Pater Babai, who gave the island its name. It has also been claimed that the ancient Nuragic Sards were associated with the Sherden, one of the Sea Peoples. The ethnonym was then romanised, with regard for the singular masculine and feminine form, as sardus and sarda.
History
Prehistory
Sardinia was first settled by modern humans from continental Europe during the Upper Paleolithic and the Mesolithic; at the time Sardinia and Corsica formed a single island, the largest in the Mediterranean, separated from the Italian peninsula by a short stretch of sea. During the Neolithic, Early European Farmers settled in Sardinia. According to modern archaeogenetic investigations, the Neolithic Sardinians showed a greater affinity with the Cardial populations of Iberia and Southern France, furthermore mitochondrial haplogroups of the ancient Mesolithic inhabitants would survive in today's Sardinians.File:Sassari - Complesso prenuragico di Monte d'Accoddi.JPG|thumb|left|250px|Megalithic altar of Monte d'Accoddi, erected by the Pre-Nuragic Sardinians from the Ozieri and Abealzu-Filigosa culture.
In the Late Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age, the Bell Beaker culture from Southern France, Northeastern Spain, and then Central Europe entered the island, bringing new metallurgical techniques and ceramic styles and probably Indo-European languages. An early modest gene flow of the Western Steppe Herders has been dated to about this period.
Nuragic civilization
The Nuragic civilization arose in the Middle Bronze Age, during the Late Bonnanaro culture, which showed connections with the previous Beaker culture and the Polada culture of northern Italy. Although the Sardinians were considered to have acquired a sense of national identity, at that time, the grand tribal identities of the Nuragic Sardinians were said to be three : the Iolei/Ilienses, inhabiting the area from the southernmost plains to the mountainous zone of eastern Sardinia ; the Balares, living in the North-West corner; and finally the Corsi stationed in today's Gallura and the island to which they gave the name, Corsica. Nuragic Sardinians have been connected by some scholars to the Sherden, a tribe of the so-called Sea Peoples, whose presence is registered several times in ancient Egyptian records.The language or languages spoken in Sardinia during the Bronze Age is unknown since there are no written records of such period. According to Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, the Paleo-Sardinian language was akin to Proto-Basque and the ancient Iberian. In contrast, others believe it was related to Etruscan. Other scholars theorize that there were various linguistic areas in Nuraghic Sardinia, possibly Pre-Indo-European and Indo-European.
Antiquity
In the 8th century BCE, Phoenicia founded colonies and ports along the southern and western coast, such as Karalis, Bithia, Sulki and Tharros; starting from the same areas, where the relations between the indigenous Sardinians and the descendants of Phoenician settlers, the Punic people, had been so far peaceful, the Carthaginians proceeded to annex the southern and western part of Sardinia in the late 6th century BC. Well into the 1st century BCE, native Sardinians were said to have preserved many cultural affinities with the Punic people of North Africa.After the First Punic War, the whole island was conquered by the Romans in the 3rd century BC. Sardinia and Corsica were then made into a single province; however, it took the Romans more than another 150 years to manage to subdue the more belligerent Nuragic tribes of the interior, and after 184 years since the Sardinians fell under Roman sway, Cicero noted how there was still not on the island a single community which had had friendly intercourse with the Roman people. Even from the former Sardo-Carthaginian settlements, with which the Sardinian mountaineers had formed an alliance in a common struggle against the Romans, 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; 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. Overall, Sardinia was quite disliked by the Romans and, as isolated as it was kept, Romanization proceeded at a relatively slow pace.
During the Roman rule, there was a considerable immigration flow from the Italian peninsula into the island; ancient sources mention several populations of Italic origin settling down in Sardinia, like the Patulcenses Campani, the Falisci, the Buduntini and the Siculenses ; Roman colonies were also established in Porto Torres and Uselis. The Italic immigrants were confronted with a difficult coexistence with the natives, 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 as a testament of the fiercely independent spirit of the tribes who dwelled therein.
Nevertheless, Sardinia would eventually undergo cultural Romanization, the modern Sardinian language being one of the most evident cultural developments thereof. Strabo gave a brief summary about the Mountaineer tribes, living in what would be called civitates Barbariae, Geographica V ch.2:
There are four nations of mountaineers, the Parati, Sossinati, Balari, and the Aconites. These people dwell in caverns. Although they have some arable land, they neglect its cultivation, preferring rather to plunder what they find cultivated by others, whether on the island or on the continent, where they make descents, especially upon the Pisatæ. The prefects sent 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.
Middle Ages
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Sardinia was ruled in rapid succession by the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Ostrogoths and again by the Byzantines, when the island was, once again in its history, joined to North Africa as part of the Exarchate of Africa.During the Middle Ages, the "Sardinian Nation" ; all of them, except for the Judicate of Arborea, fell under the influence of the maritime republics of Genoa and Pisa, as well as some noble families from the two cities, like the Doria family, the Della Gherardesca family, and the Malaspina family. The Dorias founded the cities of Alghero and Castelgenovese, while the Pisans founded Castel di Castro and Terranova ; the famous count Ugolino della Gherardesca, quoted by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy, favored the birth of the mining town of Villa di Chiesa, which became an Italian medieval commune along with Sassari and Castel di Castro. These new cities attracted migrants from the Italian peninsula, Corsica and several regions of Sardinia.
Following the Aragonese conquest of the Sardinian territories under Pisan rule, which took place between 1323 and 1326, and then the long conflict between the Aragonese Kingdom and the Judicate of Arborea, the newborn Kingdom of Sardinia became one of the Associate States of the Crown of Aragon. The Aragonese repopulated the cities of Castel di Castro and Alghero predominantly with Catalans and the Algherese dialect of Catalan is still spoken by a minority in the city of Alghero.
Modern and contemporary history
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the main Sardinian cities of Cagliari, Alghero and Sassari appear well placed in the trade routes of the time. The cosmopolitan composition of its people provides evidence of it: the population was not only indigenous, but also hailing from Spain, Liguria, France and the island of Corsica in particular. Especially in Sassari and across the strip of territory that goes from Anglona to Gallura, the Corsicans became the majority of the population at least since the 15th century. This migration from the neighboring island, which is likely to have led to the birth of the Tuscan-sounding Sassarese and Gallurese dialects, went on continuously until the 19th century.The Spanish era ended in 1713, when Sardinia was ceded to the Austrian House of Habsburg, followed with another cession in 1718 to the Dukes of Savoy, who assumed the title of "Kings of Sardinia" and ruled the island from Turin, in Piedmont. During this period, Italianization policies were implemented, so as to assimilate the islanders to the then Savoyard mainland. In 1738, the Ligurian colonists escaped from Tabarka were invited by Charles Emmanuel III to settle on the little islands of San Pietro and Sant'Antioco, in the south-west area of Sardinia, bringing with them a Ligurian dialect called "Tabarchino", still widely spoken there. Then, the Piedmontese Kingdom of Sardinia annexed the whole Italian peninsula and Sicily in 1861 after the Risorgimento, becoming the Kingdom of Italy.
Since 1850, with the reorganization of the Sardinian mines, there had been a considerable migration flow from the Italian peninsula towards the Sardinian mining areas of Sulcis-Iglesiente; these Mainland miners came mostly from Lombardy, Piedmont, Tuscany and Romagna. 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; most of them settled in Iglesias and frazioni.
At the end of the 19th century, communities of fishermen from Sicily, Torre del Greco and Ponza migrated on the east coasts of the island, in the towns of Arbatax/Tortolì, Siniscola and La Maddalena.
In 1931, only 3.2% of the island's population was estimated to be native of the Mainland. A central government policy would change this situation in the following years, 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 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 establishing minor centres kept their dialects of Istriot, Venetian and Friulan, which are still spoken by the elderly. In the same period, a few Italian Tunisian families settled in the sparsely populated area of Castiadas, east of Cagliari.
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.