Dominica 🇩🇲

Filed under the Americas and more precisely the Caribbean, Dominica is a sovereign state. Treaties and official documents call it Commonwealth of Dominica. Its seat of government is Roseau.

It is home to roughly 66,205 people, placing it 205th of 249 by population — between the Cayman Islands above it and Bermuda below. Among the 28 entries in the Caribbean it ranks 11th by area and 19th by population.

It covers 751 km², which ranks it 193rd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Bahrain and just ahead of Tonga. That makes it a little larger than Singapore.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Dominica ranks 193rd of 249 by area and 205th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent 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 Dominica in the size ordering are Bahrain at 765 km² and Tonga at 747 km², against Dominica's 751 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Dominica averages 88 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 125th 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.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 15.4° north, 61.3° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,716 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Sudan, Chad and Niger — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

No land border connects it to another country. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Dominica has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is Martinique, roughly 90 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Dominica's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Density comes out at around 88 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

People from Dominica are called Dominicans.

The one official language is English. Another 90 entries list English too — among them American Samoa, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda and Australia.

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 41st most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in the Caribbean.

Zoom in from the world to Caribbean and Dominica sits 19th of 28 by population and 11th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Cayman Islands just above and Saint Kitts and Nevis just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇰🇾 Cayman Islands
• 🇰🇳 Saint Kitts and Nevis
• 🇭🇹 Haiti

Dominica does not have the Eastern Caribbean dollar to itself. It is one of 8 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XCD, 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 XCD travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Dominica 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.

It uses the Eastern Caribbean dollar ($, XCD). Another 7 entries use the same currency — Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, Montserrat and Saint Kitts and Nevis among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with Dominica.

The top-level domain is .dm. The international dialling code is +1767. Its ISO codes are dm and DMA, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Dominica, the answer is Roseau.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 192 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.