Finland 🇫🇮

Finland is a sovereign country in Northern Europe, in the wider region of Europe. Its full official name is Republic of Finland. Its seat of government is Helsinki.

It covers 338,424 km², which ranks it 67th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Congo and just ahead of Vietnam. That makes it almost exactly the same size as the Philippines.

The population is about 5.6 million, placing it 116th of 249 by population — between Lebanon above it and Liberia below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 2nd of 16 in size and 4th in population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 64.0° north, 26.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 7,124 km from the equator, in what geographers would call high-latitude latitudes.

It is one of the countries that the Arctic Circle crosses. Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Iceland — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

3 countries share a land border with it: Norway, Sweden and Russia. The largest of them by area is Russia, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 159.7 million people.

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

Population divided by land area gives roughly 17 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.

It recognises 2 languages: Finnish and Swedish. Finnish is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Finland.

People from Finland are called Finnish.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 23rd most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 5.1% of everyone living in Northern Europe.

Finland 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.

Language reaches wider still. Swedish is listed for 3 entries here, Finland 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.

Zoom in from the world to Northern Europe and Finland sits 4th of 16 by population and 2nd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Denmark just above and Norway 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.

• 🇩🇰 Denmark
• 🇳🇴 Norway
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Put next to every other entry on this site, Finland ranks 67th of 249 by area and 116th by population. That works out at 0.23% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.069% 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 Finland in the size ordering are Congo at 342,000 km² and Vietnam at 331,212 km², against Finland's 338,424 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Finland averages 17 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 214th 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.

Money there is the Euro (€, EUR). Another 37 entries use the same currency — Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia among them — so exchange rates move for reasons that have nothing to do with Finland.

Websites there use the .fi domain. Calls from overseas start with +358. Its ISO codes are fi and FIN, which is what most databases and flag files use.

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

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.