Cameroon 🇨🇲

Cameroon is a sovereign country in Middle Africa, in the wider region of Africa. Its full official name is Republic of Cameroon. Its seat of government is Yaoundé.

It covers 475,442 km², which ranks it 55th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Turkmenistan and just ahead of Papua New Guinea. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is a little larger than Sweden.

It is home to roughly 29.1 million people, placing it 52nd of 249 by population — between Nepal above it and Venezuela below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 6th of 10 in size and 3rd in population.

Its reference point sits at 6.0° north and 12.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 668 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Colombia, Venezuela and Guyana.

6 countries share a land border with it: the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Nigeria. The largest of them by area is Chad, while the most populous is Nigeria. Together those neighbours hold about 269.1 million people.

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

Spread across 475,442 km², that works out at about 61 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Cameroonian, so residents are Cameroonians.

It recognises 2 languages: English and French. English, the first listed, is shared with 90 other entries worldwide.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 17th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 13% of everyone living in Middle Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Middle Africa and Cameroon sits 3rd of 10 by population and 6th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Angola just above and Chad just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇦🇴 Angola
• 🇹🇩 Chad
• 🇨🇩 DR Congo

Cameroon does not have the Central African CFA franc to itself. It is one of 6 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XAF, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in XAF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Cameroon among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Cameroon ranks 55th of 249 by area and 52nd by population. That works out at 0.32% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.36% 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 Cameroon in the size ordering are Turkmenistan at 488,100 km² and Papua New Guinea at 462,840 km², against Cameroon's 475,442 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Cameroon averages 61 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 154th 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.

It uses the Central African CFA franc (Fr, XAF). It shares that currency with the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.

The top-level domain is .cm. To phone it from abroad you dial +237. In ISO terms it is cm in two letters and CMR in three.

Yaoundé is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

Cameroon 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.