Estonia 🇪🇪

Filed under Europe and more precisely Northern Europe, Estonia is a sovereign state. In formal use it is Republic of Estonia. The capital is Tallinn.

Some 1.4 million people call it home, placing it 155th of 249 by population — between Timor-Leste above it and Trinidad and Tobago below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 10th of 16 in size and 9th in population.

Its territory runs to 45,227 km², which ranks it 133rd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the Dominican Republic and just ahead of Denmark. For scale, it is a little larger than Denmark.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 59.0° N, 26.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 6,568 km from the equator, in what geographers would call high-latitude latitudes.

Russia and Canada sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

It borders 2 neighbours: Latvia and Russia. The largest of them by area is Russia, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 145.4 million people.

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

Density comes out at around 30 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.

Estonian is the only official language. No other entry in this dataset lists Estonian, so on this list it stands alone.

People from Estonia are called Estonians.

Inside Europe it places 36th of 53 by population, and it accounts for 1.3% of everyone living in Northern Europe.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Estonia ranks 133rd of 249 by area and 155th by population. That works out at 0.030% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.017% 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 Estonia in the size ordering are Dominican Republic at 48,671 km² and Denmark at 43,094 km², against Estonia's 45,227 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Estonia averages 30 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 186th 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 Northern Europe and Estonia sits 9th of 16 by population and 10th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Latvia just above and Iceland just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇱🇻 Latvia
• 🇮🇸 Iceland
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Estonia does not have the Euro to itself. It is one of 38 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EUR, 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 EUR travels further than you might expect.

Estonian is listed for Estonia 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 Euro (€, EUR). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia.

The top-level domain is .ee. Calls from overseas start with +372. Its ISO codes are ee and EST, which is what most databases and flag files use.

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

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.