Papua New Guinea 🇵🇬

Papua New Guinea is an independent state in Melanesia, and a member of the United Nations. Its full official name is Independent State of Papua New Guinea. Government sits in Port Moresby.

The land area is 462,840 km², which ranks it 56th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Cameroon and just ahead of Sweden. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as Sweden.

The population is about 10.6 million, placing it 92nd of 250 by population — between Tajikistan above it and Sweden below. Among the 5 entries in Melanesia it ranks 1st by area and 1st by population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 6.0° south, 147.0° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 668 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Tanzania, Seychelles and the British Indian Ocean Territory — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 1: Indonesia.

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

Spread across 462,840 km², that works out at about 23 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 90 per square kilometre.

3 languages carry official status: English, Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin. Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin are listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes them effectively unique to Papua New Guinea. English, the first listed, is shared with 90 other entries worldwide.

The demonym is Papua New Guinean, so residents are Papua New Guineans.

Against Oceania as a whole it is the 2nd most populous of 27 entries, and it accounts for 82% of everyone living in Melanesia.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Papua New Guinea ranks 56th of 250 by area and 92nd by population. That works out at 0.31% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 0.13% 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 Papua New Guinea in the size ordering are Cameroon at 475,442 km² and Sweden at 450,295 km², against Papua New Guinea's 462,840 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Papua New Guinea averages 23 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 201st of the 248 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.

Within Melanesia, Papua New Guinea is the most populous of the 5 entries this site lists, and the largest by area as well. Fiji is next in line by population.

Every entry in Melanesia has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, Fiji is the place to carry on.

• 🇫🇯 Fiji
• 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea

The Papua New Guinean kina (PGK) is used only in Papua New Guinea among the 250 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.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Papua New Guinea 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.

The currency is the Papua New Guinean kina (K, PGK). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Papua New Guinea.

Its internet country code is .pg. Calls from overseas start with +675. In ISO terms it is pg in two letters and PNG in three.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Papua New Guinea, the answer is Port Moresby.

As a sovereign state it is among the 193 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.