Tanzania 🇹🇿

Tanzania is a sovereign country in Eastern Africa, in the wider region of Africa. Its full official name is United Republic of Tanzania. Government sits in Dodoma.

It is home to roughly 68.6 million people, placing it 22nd of 249 by population — between the United Kingdom above it and France below. Within Eastern Africa alone it is the 2nd largest of 20 and the 2nd most populous.

The land area is 945,087 km², which ranks it 32nd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Egypt and just ahead of Nigeria. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as Nigeria.

Density comes out at around 73 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. For comparison, the median entry on this list sits near 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is multilingual, listing English and Swahili. English, the first listed, is shared with 90 other entries worldwide.

People from Tanzania are called Tanzanians.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 5th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 14% of everyone living in Eastern Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Eastern Africa and Tanzania sits 2nd of 20 by population and 2nd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Ethiopia just above and Kenya just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia
• 🇰🇪 Kenya
• 🇪🇹 Ethiopia

The coordinates the dataset gives are 6.0° S, 35.0° E, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 668 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

8 countries share a land border with it: Burundi, DR Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia. The largest of them by area is DR Congo, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 321.6 million people.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Tanzania ranks 32nd of 249 by area and 22nd by population. That works out at 0.63% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.84% 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 Tanzania in the size ordering are Egypt at 1,002,450 km² and Nigeria at 923,768 km², against Tanzania's 945,087 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Tanzania averages 73 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 142nd 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 Tanzanian shilling (TZS) is used only in Tanzania 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, Tanzania 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 Tanzanian shilling (Sh, TZS). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Tanzania.

The top-level domain is .tz. Calls from overseas start with +255. Its ISO codes are tz and TZA, which is what most databases and flag files use.

Dodoma is the city to remember for this country.

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.