Suriname 🇸🇷

Suriname is a country in South America, one of the 13 entries this site files under that subregion. Treaties and official documents call it Republic of Suriname. Government sits in Paramaribo.

It covers 163,820 km², which ranks it 92nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Uruguay and just ahead of Tunisia. That makes it a little larger than Bangladesh.

The population is about 634,431, placing it 169th of 249 by population — between Luxembourg above it and Montenegro below. Within South America alone it is the 11th largest of 13 and the 11th most populous.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 4.0° north, 56.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 445 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Cameroon, Malaysia and Equatorial Guinea — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

3 countries share a land border with it: Brazil, French Guiana and Guyana. The largest of them by area is Brazil, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 213.1 million people.

Unlike its landlocked neighbours it reaches the sea directly, while also sharing land frontiers.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 3.9 people per square kilometre, which makes it very thinly populated. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Surinamer, so residents are Surinamers.

Officially it is monolingual: Dutch. It shares that with Aruba, Belgium, the Caribbean Netherlands, Curaçao, the Netherlands and Sint Maarten.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 26th most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in South America.

The Surinamese dollar (SRD) is used only in Suriname among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Language reaches wider still. Dutch is listed for 7 entries here, Suriname among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Zoom in from the world to South America and Suriname sits 11th of 13 by population and 11th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Guyana just above and French Guiana just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

Brazil is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in South America has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇬🇾 Guyana
• 🇬🇫 French Guiana
• 🇧🇷 Brazil

Put next to every other entry on this site, Suriname ranks 92nd of 249 by area and 169th by population. That works out at 0.11% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Suriname in the size ordering are Uruguay at 181,034 km² and Tunisia at 163,610 km², against Suriname's 163,820 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Suriname averages 4 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it among the emptiest places on the list — 233rd of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

It uses the Surinamese dollar ($, SRD). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Suriname.

Paramaribo is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

The top-level domain is .sr. Calls from overseas start with +597. In ISO terms it is sr in two letters and SUR in three.

Suriname is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.