Senegal 🇸🇳

Senegal is a sovereign country in Western Africa, in the wider region of Africa. The long form of the name is Republic of Senegal. The capital is Dakar.

Its territory runs to 196,722 km², which ranks it 88th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Kyrgyzstan and just ahead of Syria. That makes it a fraction smaller than Belarus.

Some 18.5 million people call it home, placing it 69th of 249 by population — between Somalia above it and Guatemala below. Among the 17 entries in Western Africa it ranks 9th by area and 7th by population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 14.0° north, 14.0° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,558 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Sudan, Yemen and Thailand — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 5: the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Mauritania. The largest of them by area is Mali, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 49.4 million people.

Unlike its landlocked neighbours it reaches the sea directly, while also sharing land frontiers.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 94 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.

The demonym is Senegalese, so residents are Senegalese.

Officially it is monolingual: French. French is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 45 other entries including Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi.

Inside Africa it places 25th of 59 by population, and it accounts for 4.1% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Western Africa and Senegal sits 7th of 17 by population and 9th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Burkina Faso just above and Guinea just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇧🇫 Burkina Faso
• 🇬🇳 Guinea
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

Senegal does not have the West African CFA franc to itself. It is one of 8 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XOF, 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 XOF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Senegal 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.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Senegal ranks 88th of 249 by area and 69th by population. That works out at 0.13% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.23% 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 Senegal in the size ordering are Kyrgyzstan at 199,951 km² and Syria at 185,180 km², against Senegal's 196,722 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Senegal averages 94 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 123rd 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 West African CFA franc (Fr, XOF). That is a shared currency: 7 other entries use it, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast and Mali.

The top-level domain is .sn. Calls from overseas start with +221. In ISO terms it is sn in two letters and SEN in three.

Dakar is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

Senegal is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.