1145: Some Reasons for Official Languages Jan 27, 2018

There are a few reasons why a country would have an official language. Through most of history, the idea of an official language did not exist or was irrelevant because if is hard for them to exist outside the context of a nationstate. Nevertheless, sometimes one will be used for harmony among groups living in the same nationstate, as with the first instance of an official language, Aramaic in the Persian Empire in around 500 BCE. It was to keep relations with the recently-annexed Mesopotamia peaceful, but it acted as a lingua franca (nearly 2,000 years before the French language) and was a simple solution to having to create laws in a multiethnic and multilingual empire. Other times, as with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the official languages were used to cement authority. Here, German and Hungarian, were the only official languages, even though a dozen or so other languages were spoken including Serbian, Czech, Polish, Italian, and Yiddish, but because those groups did not have as much legislative power, the Austrians and Hungarians did not want to give their languages official status, even though German and Hungarian was only spoken natively by a combined 43% of the population. Likewise, South Africa from 1984 to 1994, had only two official languages—English and Afrikaans—but the country now has eleven, with the other nine being native African languages, giving more power and opportunity to more, native African, people. Of course, the choice for many official languages are not quite as politically motivated, but simply make it easy for legal and medical uses etc., and to create a sense of national identity. This list could surely go on, but is meant only to give a general idea about why countries have official languages, if they have them at all.

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