/səˈvænə/
[noun] A large, flat area of land covered with grass and only a few trees, found in hot parts of the world, especially in Africa and South America.
This word for Africa's iconic grasslands actually comes from the Caribbean, from a people Columbus encountered on his first voyage.
The word 'savanna' begins not in Africa, where the landscape it describes is most famous, but in the Caribbean islands of the late 15th century. The Taíno people, an indigenous group living across the Greater Antilles — including present-day Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic — used the word 'zabana' to describe a large, treeless plain. When Spanish explorers arrived with Christopher Columbus in 1492, they heard this word and adopted it into their own language, writing it as 'sabana.' It was one of many Taíno words that passed into Spanish during the early years of European contact in the Americas.
The Taíno language itself belonged to the Arawakan language family, a group of related languages spoken across a wide area of the Caribbean and northern South America. Though the Taíno people were devastated by disease and colonial violence within just a few generations of European contact, their language left a remarkable number of everyday words in modern English. Words like 'hammock,' 'canoe,' 'barbecue,' and 'hurricane' all trace back to Taíno, making the language a quiet but powerful presence in English even today.
Spanish 'sabana' was used specifically to describe the flat, grassy plains of the Caribbean and South American interior — landscapes the Spanish colonisers encountered as they pushed further into the Americas. The word then passed into other European languages as travellers and writers described the landscapes of the New World. It entered English in the mid-16th century, appearing as 'savanna' or 'savannah,' with early writers using it to describe the open grasslands of Florida and other parts of the Americas that English explorers and settlers were beginning to reach.
Interestingly, the word only became strongly associated with African landscapes much later, as European explorers, missionaries, and colonisers began writing about the vast grasslands of sub-Saharan Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. Because English already had 'savanna' as the perfect word for open tropical grasslands, writers applied it naturally to these African environments — and the connection stuck so firmly that today many people assume the word is African in origin. In reality, it made a long journey: Taíno 'zabana' → Spanish 'sabana' → English 'savanna,' and only then across the Atlantic to describe landscapes on an entirely different continent.
The alternative spelling 'Savannah' — with an 'h' at the end — became famous as the name of a city in the state of Georgia, USA, founded in 1733. The city was named after the Savannah River, which in turn took its name from the Shawnee people (sometimes spelled 'Savana' in early records), though some historians also connect it to the grassy lowland terrain of the region. Today, both 'savanna' and 'savannah' are accepted spellings of the landscape word, with 'savanna' more common in scientific writing and 'savannah' slightly more common in everyday use — a small but charming fork in a word's long road through history.