World Language Map

Where is Saramaccan spoken?

Saramaccan (Saamáka) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Suriname. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Saramaccan is spoken

Saramaccan is spoken in one country: Suriname.

Country
Suriname

On the map, Saramaccan is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Saramaccan.

How many people speak Saramaccan?

Wikidata gives about 90,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2013). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Saramaccan sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Saramaccan as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Germanic
  4. Northwest Germanic
  5. West Germanic
  6. North Sea Germanic
  7. Anglo-Frisian
  8. Anglic
  9. Later Anglic
  10. Middle-Modern English
  11. Macro-English
  12. Guinea Coast Creole English
  13. Surinamese Creole English
  14. Saramaccan

More about Saramaccan

Codes: ISO 639-3 srm, Glottolog sara1340. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Saramaccan

Where is Saramaccan spoken?

Saramaccan is spoken in Suriname. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Saramaccan?

Wikidata gives about 90,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2013). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Saramaccan in?

Glottolog places Saramaccan in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Germanic, Northwest Germanic, West Germanic, North Sea Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, Anglic, Later Anglic, Middle-Modern English, Macro-English, Guinea Coast Creole English and Surinamese Creole English.

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