Sama

Sama is a term with multiple meanings across different regions and cultures, encompassing ethnicity and language, religious practice, and personal names.

The Sama, also called Sama-Bajau, are a seafaring people of maritime Southeast Asia. They traditionally inhabit coastal areas and islands around the Sulu archipelago and the southern Philippines, with communities in eastern Malaysia and Indonesia. The Sama encompass diverse subgroups united by a maritime lifestyle that has historically included fishing, boat building, and trade. Their languages form part of the Sama-Bajau language cluster within the Austronesian family, and regional varieties are spoken across the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, often with mutual loanwords from neighboring languages such as Malay and Tausug.

In linguistic terms, the Sama-Bajau languages are a branch of Austronesian languages spoken by the Sama and Bajau communities. These languages exhibit regional variation and have interacted with surrounding linguistic communities, reflecting the mobility and trading networks of their speakers.

In Arabic and Islamic contexts, samaʾ means hearing or listening and is associated with devotional practice. In Sufi traditions, the samaʾ ceremony denotes a form of listening through music, poetry, and dance intended to foster spiritual experience; in Turkish practice it is commonly called Sema or Sama and is performed by Mevlevi dervishes.

Sama also appears as a personal name in various cultures, used for given names and surnames without a single shared origin.