History and Facts

Can anyone shed some light on the variable usage of the two spellings of the country, Suriname vs. Surinam???

|states=India, Nepal, Mauritius, Netherlands, Fiji, Guyana, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Singapore, United States, United Kingdom, Réunion, Suriname
|region=Nepal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Assam, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal
|speakers=26.6 million Ethnologue http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=bho (1997)
|ranking=6
|familycolor=Indo-European
|fam2=Indo-Iranian languages
|fam3=Indo-Aryan languages
|fam4=List of Eastern Indo-Aryan languages
|fam5=Bihari languages
|script=Devanagari, Kaithi

This article is about the demographics features of the population of Suriname, including population density, Ethnic group, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population. Most Surinamers live in the narrow, northern coastal plain. The population is one of the most ethnically varied in the world. Each ethnic group preserves its own culture and many institutions, including political parties, tend to follow ethnic lines.

Image:Body of Maroon child brought before medicine man, 1955.jpg Maroon child brought before a shaman, Suriname 1955]] Maroons (from the word marronage or American/Spanish cimarrón: "fugitive, runaway", lit. "living on mountaintops"; from Spanish language cima: "top, summit") were runaway slaverys in the West Indies, Central America, South America, and North America, who formed independent settlements together.

Image:Coronie kerk op palen.jpg, Suriname|thumb|right]] Suriname is home to a many diverse religious and ethnic groups. According to recent census data, 40.7 percent of the population of Suriname is Christianity, including Roman Catholicism and other Protestantism groups—among them Moravian Church, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, Evangelicalism, Baptist, and Methodist.http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2007/90268.htm. United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (September 14, 2007).