Lithuania 🇱🇹

Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, one of the 16 entries this site files under that subregion. In formal use it is Republic of Lithuania. The capital is Vilnius.

Some 2.9 million people call it home, placing it 138th of 249 by population — between Namibia above it and Qatar below. Among the 16 entries in Northern Europe it ranks 7th by area and 7th by population.

Its territory runs to 65,300 km², which ranks it 124th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Sri Lanka and just ahead of Latvia. For scale, it is a fraction smaller than Ireland.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 56.0° N, 24.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 6,234 km from the equator, in what geographers would call high-latitude latitudes.

4 countries share a land border with it: Belarus, Latvia, Poland and Russia. The largest of them by area is Russia, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 191.1 million people.

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

Spread across 65,300 km², that works out at about 44 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

People from Lithuania are called Lithuanians.

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

Inside Europe it places 29th of 53 by population, and it accounts for 2.6% of everyone living in Northern Europe.

Lithuania 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.

Lithuanian is listed for Lithuania 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 Northern Europe and Lithuania sits 7th of 16 by population and 7th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Ireland just above and Latvia 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.

• 🇮🇪 Ireland
• 🇱🇻 Latvia
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Put next to every other entry on this site, Lithuania ranks 124th of 249 by area and 138th by population. That works out at 0.044% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.036% 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 Lithuania in the size ordering are Sri Lanka at 65,610 km² and Latvia at 64,559 km², against Lithuania's 65,300 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Lithuania averages 44 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 173rd 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.

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 .lt. Calls from overseas start with +370. Its ISO codes are lt and LTU, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Vilnius 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.