Tunisia 🇹🇳

Tunisia is a country in Northern Africa, one of the 7 entries this site files under that subregion. The long form of the name is Tunisian Republic. Its capital, Tunis, shares its name with the country itself — a giveaway that this is a city-state or something close to one.

By land area it covers 163,610 km², which ranks it 93rd of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Suriname and just ahead of Bangladesh. For scale, it is a little larger than Bangladesh.

Around 12.3 million people live there, placing it 79th of 249 by population — between Bolivia above it and South Sudan below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 7th of 7 in size and 5th in population.

Plotted on a globe it falls at 34.0° north, 9.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 3,785 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach China, Iran and Afghanistan — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

It borders 2 neighbours: Algeria and Libya. The largest of them by area is Algeria, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 54.2 million people.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

Spread across 163,610 km², that works out at about 75 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 91 per square kilometre.

People from Tunisia are called Tunisians.

The one official language is Arabic. Arabic is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 24 other entries including Algeria, Bahrain, Chad and the Comoros.

Inside Africa it places 31st of 59 by population, and it accounts for 4.5% of everyone living in Northern Africa.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Tunisia ranks 93rd of 249 by area and 79th by population. That works out at 0.11% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.15% 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 Tunisia in the size ordering are Suriname at 163,820 km² and Bangladesh at 147,570 km², against Tunisia's 163,610 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Tunisia averages 75 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 139th 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 Northern Africa and Tunisia sits 5th of 7 by population and 7th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Morocco just above and Libya just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇲🇦 Morocco
• 🇱🇾 Libya
• 🇪🇬 Egypt

The Tunisian dinar (TND) is used only in Tunisia 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. Arabic is listed for 25 entries here, Tunisia 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.

Money there is the Tunisian dinar (د.ت, TND). It is issued for Tunisia alone.

Websites there use the .tn domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +216. Its ISO codes are tn and TUN, which is what most databases and flag files use.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.