Yemen is the only sovereign country whose name begins with Y. It has held that distinction alone since 2003, when the last state calling itself Yugoslavia renamed itself Serbia and Montenegro — and Yemen itself only became a single country in 1990, when two separate Yemeni states merged.
The letter used to be busier
Y is a good illustration of how quickly the alphabetical map of the world changes. Within living memory the letter has held at least three sovereign states:
- The Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen), capital Sana'a, a republic from 1962 after the overthrow of a thousand-year-old imamate.
- The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen), capital Aden, formed from the British protectorate of Aden in 1967 and the only avowedly Marxist state in the Arab world.
- Yugoslavia, in its royal, socialist federal and later rump forms, which appeared on maps from 1918 until the name was abandoned in 2003.
The two Yemens unified in May 1990 into the Republic of Yemen, with Sana'a as capital and the southern leadership taking the vice-presidency. The merger did not settle matters: a southern attempt at secession in 1994 ended in a short war won by the north, and southern grievance about the terms of unification has been a live political force ever since.
Yugoslavia, meanwhile, came apart in a sequence of wars through the 1990s, and its successor states — Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and eventually Kosovo — took the region's alphabetical entries into other letters entirely. You can follow that sequence in our account of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The net effect is that a letter carrying three countries in 1989 carries one today.
Where Yemen actually is
- Capital: Sana'a (the internationally recognised government has operated from Aden since 2015)
- Continent: Asia (Arabian Peninsula)
- Area: about 528,000 km² — comparable to Spain plus Portugal
- Population: roughly 40 million
- Neighbours: Saudi Arabia to the north, Oman to the east
- Coastlines: the Red Sea to the west, the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea to the south
Yemen sits at the south-western tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and its position is the single most consequential thing about it. The Bab el-Mandeb strait, between Yemen and Djibouti, is only about 30 km wide at its narrowest. Every ship travelling between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal must pass through it, which makes a corner of Yemen one of the handful of maritime chokepoints that global trade depends on. Aden's natural harbour, formed inside the crater of an extinct volcano, was for a century one of the busiest bunkering ports in the world precisely because of where it sits relative to that strait.
A mountain country, not a desert one
The interior is not the flat sand that "Arabian Peninsula" suggests. Yemen's western highlands rise above 3,600 metres at Jabal an-Nabi Shu'ayb, the highest point on the peninsula, and they are high enough to intercept moisture from the Indian Ocean monsoon. That rainfall — modest by tropical standards but transformative in Arabia — supports terraced agriculture worked continuously for thousands of years, cut into slopes so steep that the fields are sometimes only a few metres wide.
Those terraces, and the mud-brick tower houses of towns like Shibam in the Hadhramaut, are why Yemen holds several UNESCO World Heritage sites. Shibam's houses stand five to eight storeys, built of unbaked mud brick, and have prompted the description of the town as a sixteenth-century Manhattan. East of the highlands the land falls away into the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, one of the largest continuous sand deserts on earth.
Yemen also holds Socotra, an archipelago some 350 km off the Horn of Africa. It has been separated from the mainland long enough that a large share of its plant species are found nowhere else, the dragon's blood tree among them. Biologically Socotra has more in common with an isolated oceanic island group than with Arabia, and it is often compared to the Galápagos for that reason.
Arabia Felix: why the Romans called it the happy one
Classical geographers divided Arabia into Arabia Deserta and Arabia Felix — fortunate Arabia — and Yemen was the fortunate part. The reason was the same rainfall that supports the terraces, combined with a monopoly. Frankincense and myrrh, harvested from trees growing in southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa, were among the most valuable commodities of the ancient Mediterranean world, and the caravan routes carrying them north ran through Yemeni territory.
The states that grew rich on that trade were substantial. The Sabaean kingdom — the Sheba of biblical tradition — built the Marib dam, an irrigation structure maintained for well over a thousand years and whose eventual failure in the sixth century CE is remembered in Arabic tradition as a civilisational rupture. Later the Himyarite kingdom controlled much of the peninsula's south. Yemen's long settled history, dense agricultural population and deep-rooted tribal structures all descend from this period, and they are the reason it looks so different from its neighbours today.
One later Yemeni export left a mark on every coffee menu in the world. Coffee was first cultivated commercially on the Yemeni highlands, and for roughly two centuries the port of al-Mukha on the Red Sea was the main outlet for the global trade. The English word mocha is simply that port's name, and the beans shipped from it gave Europe its first sustained supply. Yemen lost the trade once the Dutch and French established plantations in Java, Ceylon and the Caribbean, but the terraced highland farms that grew it are still there — increasingly planted with qat, a mild stimulant chewed widely across the country, which now competes with coffee and food crops for the same scarce irrigation water.
Yemen next to Oman: the same corner, opposite outcomes
The most illuminating comparison is with Oman, which occupies the adjacent stretch of the peninsula and shares much of Yemen's geography — mountains catching monsoon rain, a long Indian Ocean coast, a maritime trading past.
- Population: Yemen has roughly 40 million people; Oman has around 5 million. Yemen's highland agriculture supported a large settled population long before oil mattered to anyone.
- Hydrocarbons: Oman's reserves, though modest by Gulf standards, are large relative to its small population. Yemen's are small relative to a population eight times bigger — the arithmetic that separates a comfortable middle-income state from a poor one.
- Political continuity: Oman has had one ruling dynasty since the eighteenth century. Yemen has had an imamate overthrown, a British colony decolonised, a Marxist republic, a unification, a secession war and a collapse — all since 1962.
Grouped instead with the Gulf monarchies it borders, Yemen is the outlier on almost every measure: more people than Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates combined, and a small fraction of their income. Since 2014 the country has been fought over by rival authorities, with the resulting humanitarian emergency repeatedly described by the United Nations as among the worst anywhere. Any current figure for Yemen's population, economy or even its capital's effective administration carries that caveat.
The Y names that do not count
Several plausible-sounding answers fail the sovereignty test:
- Yugoslavia — dissolved; the name has not belonged to a state since 2003.
- Yukon — a territory of Canada, not a country.
- Yap — a state within the Federated States of Micronesia.
- Yucatán — a Mexican state, and the peninsula that shares its name.
- Yangon, Yekaterinburg, Yaoundé — cities, the last of them the capital of Cameroon.
- Yorkshire — an English historic county, occasionally offered in jest and, at around 11,900 km², bigger than several actual countries.
There is one further wrinkle worth knowing. Alphabetical country lists are lists in a particular language, and the English list is only one of them. Greece is Yunanistan in Turkish; Japan is Yaponiya in Russian transliteration; Jordan is al-Urdun in Arabic and files nowhere near J. Ask which countries start with Y in Turkish and you get a different set of answers entirely.
Y among the alphabet's thin letters
Four letters of the English alphabet are close to empty for country names: Q and Y hold one each, Z holds two, and W and X hold none. That cluster at the end of the alphabet is not coincidence. Y in initial position is uncommon in the European languages that supplied most colonial-era place names, and where a Y sound does begin a name it is usually written with J or I instead — Java, Jordan, Iran, Iraq.
Yemen keeps its Y because the Arabic name al-Yaman was transliterated that way and the spelling stuck. Had a different convention prevailed — and it easily could have, since the same sound is written J in Jordan's Arabic name — the letter Y might have no countries at all, and the alphabet would have three empty letters instead of two. For the crowded end of the same list, see the twenty-five countries beginning with S.