Bangladesh 🇧🇩

Filed under Asia and more precisely Southern Asia, Bangladesh is a sovereign state. In formal use it is People's Republic of Bangladesh. Dhaka is the capital.

By land area it covers 147,570 km², which ranks it 94th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Tunisia and just ahead of Nepal. That makes it almost exactly the same size as Nepal.

Around 173.6 million people live there, placing it 8th of 249 by population — between Brazil above it and Russia below. Within Southern Asia alone it is the 5th largest of 9 and the 3rd most populous.

Density comes out at around 1,176 people per square kilometre, which makes it among the most densely populated places on earth. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Bangladeshi, so residents are Bangladeshis.

Officially it is monolingual: Bengali. No other entry in this dataset lists Bengali, so on this list it stands alone.

Inside Asia it places 5th of 50 by population, and it accounts for 8.4% of everyone living in Southern Asia.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Bangladesh ranks 94th of 249 by area and 8th by population. That works out at 0.098% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 2.1% 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 Bangladesh in the size ordering are Tunisia at 163,610 km² and Nepal at 147,181 km², against Bangladesh's 147,570 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Bangladesh averages 1,176 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it one of the most densely settled places on the whole list — 12th 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.

Zoom in from the world to Southern Asia and Bangladesh sits 3rd of 9 by population and 5th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Pakistan just above and Iran just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇵🇰 Pakistan
• 🇮🇷 Iran
• 🇮🇳 India

Its reference point sits at 24.0° north and 90.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 2,672 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

The Tropic of Cancer runs through or very close to it. Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Libya.

2 countries share a land border with it: Myanmar and India. The largest of them by area is India, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 1.51 billion people.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

The Bangladeshi taka (BDT) is used only in Bangladesh 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.

Bengali is listed for Bangladesh and for no other entry on this site. A language confined to one country is unusual, and it is normally a sign of long isolation or of deliberate revival.

It uses the Bangladeshi taka (৳, BDT). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Bangladesh.

The top-level domain is .bd. Calls from overseas start with +880. In ISO terms it is bd in two letters and BGD in three.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Bangladesh, the answer is Dhaka.

Bangladesh 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.