Svalbard and Jan Mayen 🇸🇯

Svalbard and Jan Mayen is a territory in Northern Europe, and it is not a sovereign state in its own right. Treaties and official documents call it Svalbard og Jan Mayen. Government sits in Longyearbyen.

The land area is 62,045 km², which ranks it 126th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Latvia and just ahead of Togo. For scale, it is a fraction smaller than Ireland.

Its recorded population is just 2,900, among the smallest anywhere. Among the 16 entries in Northern Europe it ranks 9th by area and 16th by population.

Svalbard and Jan Mayen does not hold a United Nations seat of its own. It is administered as a dependency or overseas territory rather than as a sovereign state, which is why it sits outside the 192 member states while still appearing among the 249 entries on this site.

Not holding a UN seat is not the same as having no self-government, and the administrative details make that clear. Svalbard and Jan Mayen has 5 of the five markers of separate administration tracked on this page — its own currency, its own dialling code, its own internet domain, its own iso codes and a designated capital. In day-to-day terms it is run substantially as its own jurisdiction.

• Its own currencyNOK
• Its own dialling code+4779
• Its own internet domain.sj
• Its own ISO codessj / SJM
• A designated capitalLongyearbyen

The coordinates the dataset gives are 78.0° N, 20.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 8,683 km from the equator, in what geographers would call polar latitudes.

No land border connects it to another territory. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, which shapes how it trades and who it deals with.

Svalbard and Jan Mayen has no land border with any country, which changes what "nearby" means. Measured centre to centre in a straight line, the closest other entry on this site is Finland, roughly 1,570 km away. These are approximate distances between representative points, not the shortest crossing between two shorelines, so treat them as a sense of scale rather than a sailing chart.

Being surrounded by water rather than by neighbours pushes a country's relationships outward. Greenland sits in a different world region from Svalbard and Jan Mayen yet ranks among its closest geographic company — the kind of pairing that only shows up once you stop thinking in continents.

No land border also means no land crossing: everything and everyone arrives by sea or by air. That single fact drives a lot of what follows on this page, from how goods reach the shops to why Svalbard and Jan Mayen's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 0.05 people per square kilometre, which makes it one of the emptiest inhabited places on the list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

Norwegian is the only official language. It shares that with Bouvet Island.

The demonym is Norwegian, so residents are Norwegians.

Against Europe as a whole it is the 52nd most populous of 53 entries, and it accounts for under 1% of everyone living in Northern Europe.

Svalbard and Jan Mayen does not have the krone to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is NOK, and the other one is 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 NOK travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Norwegian is listed for 2 entries here, Svalbard and Jan Mayen 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.

Within Northern Europe, Svalbard and Jan Mayen is the least populous of the 16 entries listed here, and 9th by area. Åland Islands 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.

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

• 🇦🇽 Åland Islands
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

It uses the krone (kr, NOK). It shares that currency with Norway.

The top-level domain is .sj. Calls from overseas start with +4779. In ISO terms it is sj in two letters and SJM in three.

Longyearbyen is the city to remember for this territory.

On the UN list it does not appear as a member. It uses Norway's currency and issues none of its own, which is the usual mark of a dependency. Of the 249 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.