Greenland 🇬🇱

Greenland is one of the territories of North America that appears on world lists without being a UN member state. Its seat of government is Nuuk.

The land area is 2,166,086 km², which ranks it 13th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind DR Congo and just ahead of Saudi Arabia. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Saudi Arabia.

It is home to roughly 56,836 people, placing it 208th of 249 by population — between Guernsey above it and the Faroe Islands below. Within North America alone it is the 3rd largest of 7 and the 5th most populous.

Greenland does not hold a United Nations seat of its own. It is administered as a dependency or overseas territory rather than as a sovereign state, which is why it sits outside the 192 member states while still appearing among the 249 entries on this site.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. Greenland has 5 of the five markers of separate administration tracked on this page — its own currency, its own dialling code, its own internet domain, its own iso codes and a designated capital. In day-to-day terms it is run substantially as its own jurisdiction.

• Its own currencyDKK
• Its own dialling code+299
• Its own internet domain.gl
• Its own ISO codesgl / GRL
• A designated capitalNuuk

Plotted on a globe it falls at 72.0° north, 40.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 8,015 km from the equator, in what geographers would call polar latitudes.

The Arctic Circle runs through or very close to it.

There is no land frontier at all — every boundary it has is a coastline. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Greenland 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 Iceland, roughly 1,180 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.

Being surrounded by water rather than by neighbours pushes a country's relationships outward. Iceland, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Faroe Islands, Norway and Sweden sit in a different world region from Greenland yet rank among its closest geographic company — the kind of pairing that only shows up once you stop thinking in continents.

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 Greenland's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 0.03 people per square kilometre, which makes it one of the emptiest inhabited places on the list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

The demonym is Greenlandic, so residents are Greenlandics.

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

Against the Americas as a whole it is the 43rd most populous of 55 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in North America.

Greenland does not have the krone to itself. It is one of 3 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is DKK, 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 DKK travels further than you might expect.

Greenlandic is listed for Greenland 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.

Zoom in from the world to North America and Greenland sits 5th of 7 by population and 3rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Bermuda just above and Saint Pierre and Miquelon just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇧🇲 Bermuda
• 🇵🇲 Saint Pierre and Miquelon
• 🇺🇸 United States

It uses the krone (kr., DKK). It shares that currency with Denmark and the Faroe Islands.

The top-level domain is .gl. The international dialling code is +299. In ISO terms it is gl in two letters and GRL in three.

Nuuk is the city to remember for this territory.

It does not hold a UN seat of its own. It uses Denmark's currency and issues none of its own, which is the usual mark of a dependency. Of the 249 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.