Slovenia 🇸🇮

Slovenia is a country in Central Europe, one of the 6 entries this site files under that subregion. The long form of the name is Republic of Slovenia. The capital is Ljubljana.

Its territory runs to 20,273 km², which ranks it 155th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Israel and just ahead of New Caledonia. That makes it about two thirds the size of Belgium.

Some 2.1 million people call it home, placing it 148th of 249 by population — between Guinea-Bissau above it and Equatorial Guinea below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 6th of 6 in size and 6th in population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 46.1° north, 14.8° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 5,134 km from the equator, in what geographers would call temperate latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Saint Pierre and Miquelon — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

4 countries share a land border with it: Austria, Croatia, Italy and Hungary. The largest of them by area is Italy, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 81.6 million people.

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

Spread across 20,273 km², that works out at about 105 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.

Someone from Slovenia is a Slovene.

Officially it is monolingual: Slovene. No other entry in this dataset lists Slovene, so on this list it stands alone.

Inside Europe it places 32nd of 53 by population, and it accounts for 2.9% of everyone living in Central Europe.

Slovenia 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.

Slovene is listed for Slovenia 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.

Within Central Europe, Slovenia is the least populous of the 6 entries listed here, and 6th by area. Slovakia 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.

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

• 🇸🇰 Slovakia
• 🇵🇱 Poland

Put next to every other entry on this site, Slovenia ranks 155th of 249 by area and 148th by population. That works out at 0.014% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.026% 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 Slovenia in the size ordering are Israel at 20,770 km² and New Caledonia at 18,575 km², against Slovenia's 20,273 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Slovenia averages 105 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 111th 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). That is a shared currency: 37 other entries use it, including Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and Croatia.

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

Its internet country code is .si. Calls from overseas start with +386. Standard country codes: si and SVN.

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.