Hungary 🇭🇺

Filed under Europe and more precisely Central Europe, Hungary is a sovereign state. Unlike most entries, its formal name adds nothing to the short one. Government sits in Budapest.

It is home to roughly 9.6 million people, placing it 96th of 249 by population — between Israel above it and Togo below. Within Central Europe alone it is the 2nd largest of 6 and the 3rd most populous.

It covers 93,028 km², which ranks it 110th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind South Korea and just ahead of Portugal. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as Portugal.

Hungary has no coastline of its own, so every ship-borne import and export crosses somebody else's border first. The good news is that the sea is only one frontier away: Ukraine, Romania, Croatia and Slovenia have coastline, which makes them the obvious routes for freight heading to a port.

That geography has practical consequences. Landlocked countries carry higher freight costs than coastal ones because goods change hands, transport mode and jurisdiction more often, and because a neighbour's road, rail or customs problem becomes Hungary's problem too. It is also why transit agreements with bordering states, and access to their ports, tend to matter more in Hungary's foreign policy than the distance on a map would suggest.

Of the countries on Hungary's borders, Austria, Serbia and Slovakia are landlocked as well, so a route in that direction only moves the problem along. The remaining borders are the ones that lead, eventually, to salt water.

Coastal countries on the border:

• 🇺🇦 Ukraine
• 🇷🇴 Romania
• 🇭🇷 Croatia
• 🇸🇮 Slovenia

Plotted on a globe it falls at 47.0° north, 20.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,232 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Saint Pierre and Miquelon — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

7 countries share a land border with it: Austria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine. The largest of them by area is Ukraine, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 84.1 million people.

It has no sea coast of its own. That is true of 45 of the 249 entries here, which reliably raises the cost of trade, because port access depends on a transit agreement with a neighbour. 3 of its neighbours, Austria, Serbia and Slovakia, are landlocked too. You can see the full picture on the landlocked countries page.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 103 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

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

The demonym is Hungarian, so residents are Hungarians.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 16th most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 13% of everyone living in Central Europe.

Zoom in from the world to Central Europe and Hungary sits 3rd of 6 by population and 2nd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Czechia just above and Austria just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇨🇿 Czechia
• 🇦🇹 Austria
• 🇵🇱 Poland

The currency is the Hungarian forint (Ft, HUF). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

Its internet country code is .hu. Calls from overseas start with +36. In ISO terms it is hu in two letters and HUN in three.

Budapest 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.

The Hungarian forint (HUF) is used only in Hungary among the 249 entries on this site. Its own currency is one of the clearest markers of an economy that sets its own monetary policy rather than importing somebody else's.

Hungarian is listed for Hungary 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.