Likely a form related to Joanna or Ioanna, from Hebrew Yohanan meaning God is gracious.
Ianna is a name that moves between at least two powerful origins. At its deepest stratum lies Inanna, the great goddess of ancient Sumer — deity of love, war, fertility, and the evening star — whose cult flourished in the city of Uruk more than four thousand years ago and whose myths constitute some of the oldest written literature on earth. The "Descent of Inanna" into the underworld, recorded on clay tablets, is a poem of death, transformation, and resurrection that predates comparable Greek myths by over a millennium.
As a simplified form, Ianna carries that ancient resonance: the name of a goddess who crossed the boundary of death and returned. Ianna is also read as a variant of Iana or Yana, Slavic forms of the feminine name ultimately derived from the Hebrew Yochanan through the Latin Ioanna — the same root that gives English Jane, Joan, and Jean, all meaning "God is gracious." In this lineage the name is warm and familiar, wearing a slightly more unusual spelling that distinguishes it from the crowd.
Romanian, Bulgarian, and Russian speakers encounter Iana as a graceful, literary variant, and its Italian cognate Gianna adds further Mediterranean warmth. The double origin — Sumerian cosmic goddess or Slavic grace-name — gives parents considerable interpretive latitude. In contemporary usage, Ianna appeals to those seeking a name that sounds timeless without being overexposed, and whose spelling suggests something considered rather than conventional. The three open vowels give it a musical, vowel-rich quality that sits comfortably across many languages and cultures.