Sierra Leone 🇸🇱

Sierra Leone lies in Western Africa, part of Africa. Its full official name is Republic of Sierra Leone. Its seat of government is Freetown.

The population is about 8.6 million, placing it 101st of 249 by population — between Switzerland above it and Laos below. Within Western Africa alone it is the 12th largest of 17 and the 11th most populous.

The land area is 71,740 km², which ranks it 120th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Panama and just ahead of Ireland. That makes it almost exactly the same size as Ireland.

Its reference point sits at 8.5° north and 11.5° west, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 946 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Ethiopia, Venezuela and Somalia.

Its land neighbours number 2: Guinea and Liberia. The largest of them by area is Guinea, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 20.4 million people.

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

Population divided by land area gives roughly 120 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: English. Another 90 entries list English too — among them American Samoa, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda and Australia.

The demonym is Sierra Leonean, so residents are Sierra Leoneans.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 34th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 1.9% of everyone living in Western Africa.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Sierra Leone ranks 120th of 249 by area and 101st by population. That works out at 0.048% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.11% 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 Sierra Leone in the size ordering are Panama at 75,417 km² and Ireland at 70,273 km², against Sierra Leone's 71,740 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Sierra Leone averages 120 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 100th 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.

Zoom in from the world to Western Africa and Sierra Leone sits 11th of 17 by population and 12th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Togo just above and Liberia 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.

• 🇹🇬 Togo
• 🇱🇷 Liberia
• 🇳🇬 Nigeria

The Sierra Leonean leone (SLL) is used only in Sierra Leone 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.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Sierra Leone 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.

It uses the Sierra Leonean leone (Le, SLL). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Sierra Leone.

Freetown is the city to remember for this country.

The top-level domain is .sl. Calls from overseas start with +232. In ISO terms it is sl in two letters and SLE in three.

Sierra Leone 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.