The authors agree that the surname goes back to the Greek term bárbaros (βάρβαρος), which originally designated someone who uttered an incomprehensible speech —a kind of babbling "bar bar"— and which over time acquired the sense of "foreigner, speaker of an incomprehensible language". F. Miranda specifies that this word gave rise to the imperial Latin cognomen Barbarus, and that in the Early Middle Ages the term was applied both to Germanic groups settled in the north and to Arabs and Saracens present mainly in southern Italy.

V. Blunda provides a dialectal perspective centred on Sicily: the surname would derive from the Sicilian word bàrbaru, meaning "foreigner, outsider". In medieval Sicily, marked by successive Arab, Norman, Swabian and Aragonese dominations, the term designated the newcomer of uncertain provenance, without the pejorative charge it would have in modern Italian.

Miranda notes that the surname is widespread throughout the Italian peninsula, with greater presence in the southern regions: Sicily, Calabria, Puglia, Campania and Basilicata, although it also appears in Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Lazio and Tuscany. In Sicily it is recorded in almost all the provinces, with special concentration in the Messina, Palermo, Catania, Trapani and Agrigento areas.