Sri Lanka 🇱🇰

Sri Lanka is an independent state in Southern Asia, and a member of the United Nations. Treaties and official documents call it Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. Government sits in Colombo.

The land area is 65,610 km², which ranks it 123rd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Georgia and just ahead of Lithuania. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is a fraction smaller than Ireland.

The population is about 21.9 million, placing it 61st of 249 by population — between Taiwan above it and Malawi below. Within Southern Asia alone it is the 7th largest of 9 and the 7th most populous.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 7.0° N, 81.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 779 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Ethiopia, Venezuela and the Central African Republic sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

It borders 1 neighbour: India.

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

Density comes out at around 334 people per square kilometre, which makes it densely populated. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is multilingual, listing Sinhala and Tamil. Sinhala is listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes it effectively unique to Sri Lanka.

The demonym is Sri Lankan, so residents are Sri Lankans.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 24th most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for 1.1% of everyone living in Southern Asia.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Sri Lanka ranks 123rd of 249 by area and 61st by population. That works out at 0.044% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.27% 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 Sri Lanka in the size ordering are Georgia at 69,700 km² and Lithuania at 65,300 km², against Sri Lanka's 65,610 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Sri Lanka averages 334 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it densely settled by global standards — 41st 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 Southern Asia and Sri Lanka sits 7th of 9 by population and 7th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Nepal just above and Bhutan just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇳🇵 Nepal
• 🇧🇹 Bhutan
• 🇮🇳 India

The Sri Lankan rupee (LKR) is used only in Sri Lanka 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. Tamil is listed for 3 entries here, Sri Lanka 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 Sri Lankan rupee (Rs රු, LKR). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

The top-level domain is .lk. To phone it from abroad you dial +94. In ISO terms it is lk in two letters and LKA in three.

Colombo is the city to remember for this country.

Sri Lanka 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.