Only three sovereign countries begin with the letter F: Fiji, Finland and France. That makes F one of the sparsest letters in the alphabet — and yet one of the three, France, has territory in every ocean and spans more time zones than any other country on earth.
France is the country that is everywhere
- Capital: Paris
- Area: about 552,000 km² in Europe; roughly 644,000 km² including overseas territories
- Population: roughly 68 million
- Time zones: twelve — more than any other country
Most descriptions of France stop at the hexagon of metropolitan Europe, and that misses what is geographically remarkable about it. France's overseas departments and territories are full parts of the republic, not colonies: Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, French Guiana in South America, Réunion and Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, French Polynesia and New Caledonia in the Pacific, and Saint Pierre and Miquelon off Newfoundland.
The consequences are strange and specific. France's longest land border is with Brazil, because French Guiana adjoins it. France borders the Netherlands, because the Caribbean island of Saint Martin is split between the two. The European Union's territory extends into South America and the Pacific because French departments are in it. And France holds the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world — over 11 million km² of ocean — despite being a mid-sized country in Europe.
Metropolitan France itself is unusually varied for its size: Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, the Alps and Pyrenees on two frontiers, the Massif Central, and the Loire, Seine, Rhône and Garonne basins. Mont Blanc, on the Italian border, is the highest summit in western Europe at about 4,808 metres. Our France country guide goes further into the regions.
Finland counts its lakes in the tens of thousands
- Capital: Helsinki
- Area: about 338,000 km²
- Population: roughly 5.6 million
- Lakes: around 188,000 larger than 500 square metres
Finland's landscape is a direct product of the last ice age. The retreating ice sheet scoured the bedrock and left behind a mosaic of shallow basins, which is why the country has one of the highest densities of lakes anywhere and why so much of the south-east is more water than land. The same process left thousands of islands in the Baltic — the Turku archipelago alone contains a vast number of them — and the land is still rising as it rebounds from the weight of the vanished ice, adding a small amount of new territory each year.
About a quarter of Finland lies north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun stays up for weeks in summer and stays down for weeks in winter. Forest covers roughly three-quarters of the country, the highest proportion in Europe, and forestry has correspondingly shaped the economy for centuries. The far north is Sápmi, home to the Sámi, the only recognised indigenous people of the European Union.
Finland was a Swedish possession for some six centuries, then a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, and declared independence in 1917 during the Russian revolution. It shares a land border with Russia of roughly 1,340 km — the longest of any EU member — and after decades of formal non-alignment it joined NATO in 2023. Finnish, like Estonian, is a Uralic language and unrelated to Swedish or Russian.
Fiji is 330 islands and a line on the map
- Capital: Suva, on Viti Levu
- Area: about 18,300 km²
- Population: roughly 930,000
- Islands: around 330, of which some 110 are inhabited
Fiji is the most substantial state in the South Pacific outside Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, and it functions as the region's hub: the University of the South Pacific is headquartered there, and Nadi is the main air gateway for much of Oceania. Two large islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, hold the great majority of the population; both are volcanic in origin and mountainous enough to have sharply wet windward and dry leeward sides.
The 180th meridian passes through Fiji, which would in principle put parts of the country a calendar day apart. In practice the international date line is drawn to detour around it, so the whole country keeps one date — one of several deliberate kinks in a line that follows political convenience rather than the meridian.
Fiji's modern demography comes from the sugar industry. Under British rule, indentured labourers were brought from India between 1879 and 1916, and their descendants became a large share of the population — at times close to half. That division between Indigenous Fijian and Indo-Fijian communities has driven repeated political crises since independence in 1970, including several coups. Sugar has since been overtaken by tourism and by bottled water as the leading export earners — Fiji is one of very few countries whose most recognisable global product is its own groundwater.
Fiji's other distinction is diplomatic weight relative to size. It is the usual seat for Pacific regional organisations, it has contributed troops to United Nations peacekeeping operations for decades in numbers far out of proportion to its population, and it speaks with unusual prominence in international negotiations on sea-level rise — an issue on which several of its low-lying neighbours face existential stakes and on which Fiji has relocated villages already.
Three countries, three very different scales
Read together, the F countries make an unusually wide spread for a three-member letter:
- Population: France has roughly 73 times Fiji's population and twelve times Finland's.
- Territory: Fiji's land area is tiny, but its exclusive economic zone is over 1.2 million km² — around seventy times its land — the standard pattern for a Pacific island state.
- Latitude: Finland reaches beyond 70°N; Fiji sits between about 16°S and 20°S. France, through its territories, spans from the Arctic-adjacent north Atlantic to the sub-Antarctic.
- What they share: all three are archipelagic in some meaningful sense — Fiji entirely, Finland through its Baltic islands, France through territories on four continents.
None of the three calls itself an F name
Here is the coincidence that makes the letter genuinely odd: all three F countries are known internationally by a name that came from outside, and none of the three names is what the country's own majority language calls it.
- France is named after the Franks, a confederation of Germanic peoples who moved into the Roman province of Gaul and gave their name to it. A country whose language is descended from Latin therefore carries a Germanic name — and the people the Romans found there, the Gauls, are not in the name at all.
- Finland is a Germanic construction, reaching English through Swedish. Finns call their country Suomi and their language suomi. Had the endonym prevailed in international usage, as Eswatini's did in 2018, the letter F would have two members and S would have another.
- Fiji is an anglicisation at one remove. The Fijian name for the main island group is Viti; Tongan neighbours rendered it Fisi; European visitors, hearing it from Tongans first, wrote it down as Fiji. The country's official name in Fijian is Matanitu Tugalala o Viti — a V, not an F.
So the letter F owes all three of its entries to exonyms: names applied by neighbours, invaders or passing sailors. That is not unusual in itself — Germany, Greece, India, Japan and China are all known internationally by names their inhabitants do not use — but having it apply to every member of a letter is a neat accident, and it hints at why F is thin. The letter got its countries from what outsiders wrote down, and outsiders' spellings were the ones most likely to be revised once a country could choose for itself.
The F countries that are no longer on the map
The letter was busier in the twentieth century, though mostly with colonial constructions:
- Formosa — the Portuguese-derived name by which Taiwan was widely known in English into the 1970s.
- French Sudan — became Mali in 1960.
- French Somaliland — became Djibouti in 1977.
- French Indochina — dissolved into Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
- French Equatorial Africa and French West Africa — federations that broke into a dozen present-day states.
- Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland — dissolved in 1963 into Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Notice how many begin with "French" or "Federation". Both patterns disappeared with decolonisation, because newly independent states almost never keep a coloniser's name or a federal label — and that is most of the reason F is thin today. The residue of F-initial vocabulary in the languages of European mapmaking went into descriptive and administrative terms, not into the names peoples use for themselves.
A few F entities still exist without being countries: the Faroe Islands, self-governing within the Kingdom of Denmark; the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory claimed by Argentina as the Malvinas; Florida and Flanders, a US state and a Belgian region. And there is the Federated States of Micronesia, which is genuinely sovereign — but files under M in every standard list, in the same way the Democratic Republic of the Congo files under C. For more of those filing puzzles, see the countries that start with D.