Yemen 🇾🇪

Yemen is a country in Western Asia, one of the 17 entries this site files under that subregion. Its full official name is Republic of Yemen. Government sits in Sana'a.

It covers 527,968 km², which ranks it 51st of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind France and just ahead of Thailand. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Thailand.

The population is about 40.6 million, placing it 38th of 249 by population — between Canada above it and Morocco below. Within Western Asia alone it is the 3rd largest of 17 and the 3rd most populous.

The coordinates the dataset gives are 15.0° N, 48.0° E, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 1,670 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

Niger, Mali and Thailand sit at almost exactly the same latitude on other parts of the globe.

2 countries share a land border with it: Oman and Saudi Arabia. The largest of them by area is Saudi Arabia, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 40.6 million people.

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

Population divided by land area gives roughly 77 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 monolingual: Arabic. Another 24 entries list Arabic too — among them Algeria, Bahrain, Chad and the Comoros.

People from Yemen are called Yemenis.

Against Asia as a whole it is the 16th most populous of 50 entries, and it accounts for 13% of everyone living in Western Asia.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Yemen ranks 51st of 249 by area and 38th by population. That works out at 0.35% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.50% 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 Yemen in the size ordering are France at 551,695 km² and Thailand at 513,120 km², against Yemen's 527,968 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Yemen averages 77 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 136th 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 Western Asia and Yemen sits 3rd of 17 by population and 3rd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is Iraq just above and Saudi Arabia just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

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

• 🇮🇶 Iraq
• 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia
• 🇹🇷 Türkiye

The Yemeni rial (YER) is used only in Yemen 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, Yemen 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 Yemeni rial (﷼, YER). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Yemen.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Yemen, the answer is Sana'a.

The top-level domain is .ye. To phone it from abroad you dial +967. Its ISO codes are ye and YEM, which is what most databases and flag files use.

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.