Wallis and Futuna 🇼🇫

Wallis and Futuna is one of the territories of Polynesia that appears on world lists without being a UN member state. Its full official name is Territory of the Wallis and Futuna Islands. Its seat of government is Mata-Utu.

The population is about 11,600, placing it 228th of 249 by population — between Nauru above it and Saint Barthélemy below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 7th of 10 in size and 6th in population.

It covers 142 km², which ranks it 226th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the British Virgin Islands and just ahead of Christmas Island. Put next to a territory most people can picture, it is a fraction smaller than Liechtenstein.

Wallis and Futuna 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. Wallis and Futuna 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 currencyXPF
• Its own dialling code+681
• Its own internet domain.wf
• Its own ISO codeswf / WLF
• A designated capitalMata-Utu

Plotted on a globe it falls at 13.3° south, 176.2° west, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 1,481 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Angola, Zambia and Malawi — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

There is no land frontier at all — every boundary it has is a coastline. That puts it among the 85 entries of 249 here with no land neighbours, a group made up mostly of islands and island groups.

Wallis and Futuna 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 Samoa, roughly 420 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.

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 Wallis and Futuna's dialling code and internet domain are worth knowing before you travel.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 82 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.

Officially it is monolingual: French. Another 45 entries list French too — among them Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso and Burundi.

The demonym is Wallis and Futuna Islander, so residents are Wallis and Futuna Islanders.

Against Oceania as a whole it is the 20th most populous of 27 entries, and it accounts for 1.7% of everyone living in Polynesia.

Wallis and Futuna does not have the CFP franc to itself. It is one of 3 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XPF, 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 XPF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Wallis and Futuna 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.

Zoom in from the world to Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna sits 6th of 10 by population and 7th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Cook Islands just above and Tuvalu just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇨🇰 Cook Islands
• 🇹🇻 Tuvalu
• 🇵🇫 French Polynesia

It uses the CFP franc (₣, XPF). It shares that currency with French Polynesia and New Caledonia.

The top-level domain is .wf. To phone it from abroad you dial +681. In ISO terms it is wf in two letters and WLF in three.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Wallis and Futuna, the answer is Mata-Utu.

Wallis and Futuna is not a UN member state. The dataset does not record which state administers it, so this page does not guess. Of the 249 entries here, 57 are territories or observers rather than member states.