Saarland (German: [ˈzaːʁ̞lant] ⓘ, Luxembourgish: [ˈzaːlɑnt]; French: Sarre [saʁ]) is a state of Germany in the southwest of the country.

Saarland is mainly surrounded by the department of Moselle (Grand Est) in France to the west and south and the neighboring state of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany to the north and east; it also shares a small border about 8 kilometres (5 miles) long with the canton of Remich in Luxembourg to the northwest.

Having long been a relatively small part of the long-contested territories along the Franco-German linguistic border, Saarland first gained specific economic and strategic importance in the nineteenth century due to the wealth of its coal deposits and the heavy industrialization that grew as a result.

Saarland was first established as a distinct political entity in 1920 after World War I as the Territory of the Saar Basin, which was occupied and governed by France under a League of Nations mandate.

On 31 July 1870, the French Emperor Napoleon III ordered an invasion across the River Saar to seize Saarbrücken.

In 1933, a considerable number of communists and other political opponents of Nazism fled to the Saar, as it was the only part of Germany that remained outside national administration following the First World War.

When the original 15-year term was over, a plebiscite was held in the territory on 13 January 1935 in which 90.8 percent of those voting favoured rejoining Germany.

Following the referendum Josef Bürckel was appointed on 1 March 1935 as the German Reich's commissioner for reintegration (Reichskommissar für die Rückgliederung des Saarlandes).

In September 1939, in response to the German invasion of Poland, French forces invaded the Saarland in a half-hearted offensive, occupying some villages and meeting little resistance, before withdrawing.

He died on 28 September 1944 and was succeeded by Willi Stöhr, who remained in office until the region fell to advancing American forces in March 1945.

France did not annex the Saar or expel the local German population, in contrast to the fate of the territories which were merged by Poland and the USSR.

On 27 October 1956, the Saar Treaty declared that Saarland should be allowed to join West Germany, which it did on 1 January 1957.

After unification, the Saar franc remained as the territory's currency until West Germany's Deutsche Mark replaced it on 7 July 1959.

The Saar Treaty established that French, not English as in the rest of West Germany, should remain the first foreign language taught in Saarland schools; this provision was still largely followed after it was no longer binding.

Within Germany, it is slightly larger than the combined area of the three city-states (Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg) but is by far the smallest of the Flächenländer ("area-states").

Except for the periods between 1985 and 1999, as well as since 2022 – when the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) has held a majority of seats in the Landtag (state diet) – the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has governed the Saarland, either alone or in coalition, since the accession of the state to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957.

People in the Saarland speak Rhine Franconian (in the southeast, very similar to that dialect spoken in the western part of the Palatinate) and Moselle Franconian (in the northwest, very similar to that dialect spoken along the river Moselle and the cities of Trier or even in Luxembourg).

The English sentence "My house is green" is pronounced almost the same in the Rhine Franconian variant: Mei Haus is grien.

Regional beer brewer Karlsberg has taken advantage of the Saarlandish dialect to create clever advertising for its staple product, UrPils.

Examples include a trio of men enjoying a beer, flanked by baby carriages, the slogan reading "Mutter schafft" (meaning "Mum's at work" in Saarlandish, but plays on the High German word Mutterschaft 'motherhood'); another depicts a trio of men at a bar, with one realizing his beer has been drunk by one of the others, the slogan reading "Kenner war's" (meaning "It was no one" [Keiner war es] in Saarlandish, but playing on the High German word Kenner 'connoisseur', translating to "It was a connoisseur"); a third shows an empty beer crate in outer space, the text reading "All" (meaning "empty" in Saarlandish, but playing on the same High German word meaning "outer space").

In January 2014 the Saarland state government announced its aim of making the region fully bilingual in German and French by 2043.

[20] The Saar competed in the qualifying section of the 1954 FIFA World Cup, but failed after coming second to West Germany but ahead of Norway.