Montenegro 🇲🇪

Filed under Europe and more precisely Southeast Europe, Montenegro is a sovereign state. Unlike most entries, its formal name adds nothing to the short one. Its seat of government is Podgorica.

The land area is 13,812 km², which ranks it 162nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the Bahamas and just ahead of Vanuatu. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is around a quarter larger than Qatar.

It is home to roughly 623,525 people, placing it 170th of 249 by population — between Suriname above it and Western Sahara below. Among the 9 entries in Southeast Europe it ranks 8th by area and 9th by population.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 42.5° N, 19.3° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 4,731 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

Its land neighbours number 5: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo and Serbia. The largest of them by area is Serbia, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 17.8 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 45 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.

The demonym is Montenegrin, so residents are Montenegrins.

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

Against Europe as a whole it is the 39th most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for 1.4% of everyone living in Southeast Europe.

Within Southeast Europe, Montenegro is the least populous of the 9 entries listed here, and 8th by area. Kosovo is the next step up. Being the smallest of a group is not the same as being small in absolute terms — the subregional context is what gives the figure meaning.

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

• 🇽🇰 Kosovo
• 🇷🇴 Romania

Montenegro 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.

Montenegrin is listed for Montenegro 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Montenegro ranks 162nd of 249 by area and 170th by population. That works out at less than a thousandth of a percent of the combined land area of all 249 entries and less than a thousandth of a percent 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 Montenegro in the size ordering are Bahamas at 13,943 km² and Vanuatu at 12,189 km², against Montenegro's 13,812 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Montenegro averages 45 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 172nd 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.

The currency 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 Montenegro.

Its internet country code is .me. The international dialling code is +382. In ISO terms it is me in two letters and MNE in three.

Podgorica 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.