An official language is a language having certain rights to be used in defined situations. These rights can be created in written form or by historic usage.
178 countries recognize an official language, 101 of them recognizing more than one. The government of Italy made Italian official only in 1999, and some nations (such as the United States, Mexico, Uruguay and Australia) have never declared de jure official languages at the national level. Other nations have declared non-indigenous official languages.
Many of the world's constitutions mention one or more official or national languages. Some countries use the official language designation to empower indigenous groups by giving them access to the government in their native languages. In countries that do not formally designate an official language, a de facto national language usually evolves. English is the most common official language, with recognized status in 51 countries. Arabic, French, and Spanish are also widely recognized.
An official language that is also an indigenous language is called endoglossic, one that is not indigenous is exoglossic. An instance is Nigeria which has three endoglossic official languages. By this, the country aims to protect the indigenous languages although at the same time recognising the English language as its lingua franca. In spatial terms, indigenous (endoglossic) languages are mostly employed in the function of official (state) languages in Eurasia, while mainly non-indigenous (exoglossic) imperial (European) languages fulfill this function in most of the "Rest of the World" (that is, in Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceania). Ethiopia, Somalia, South Africa, North African countries, Greenland, Tanzania, Samoa and Paraguay are among the exceptions to this tendency.
History
Around 500 BC, when Darius the Great annexed Mesopotamia to the Persian Empire, he chose a form of the Aramaic language (the so-called Official Aramaic or Imperial Aramaic) as the vehicle for written communication between the different regions of the vast empire with its different peoples and languages. Aramaic script was widely employed from Egypt in the southwest to Bactria and Sogdiana in the northeast. Texts were dictated in the native dialects and written down in Aramaic, and then read out again in the native language at the places they were received.
The First Emperor of Qin standardized the written language of China after unifying the country in 221 BC. Classical Chinese would remain the standard written language for the next 2000 years. Standardization of the spoken language received less political attention, and Mandarin developed on an ad hoc basis from the dialects of the various imperial capitals until being officially standardized in the early twentieth century.
Statistics
The following languages are official (de jure or de facto) in three or more sovereign states. In some cases, a language may be defined as different languages in different countries. Examples are Hindi and Urdu, Malay and Indonesian, Serbian and Croatian, Persian and Tajik. English: 58 UN states and 31 dependencies French: 28 UN states and 11 dependencies Arabic: 23 UN states and Palestine, 2 non-UN states on the same territory, and 1 dependency Spanish: 20 UN states and 1 dependency Portuguese: 9 UN states and 1 dependency German: 6 UN states Russian: 5 UN and 4 unrecognized states Serbo-Croatian: 4 UN states and 1 partially recognized state on the same territory Malay: 4 UN states and 1 dependency Swahili: 4 UN states (5 counting Comorian) Italian: 3 UN states and Vatican City Persian: 3 UN states and 1 dependency Dutch: 3 UN states (4 counting Afrikaans) Somali: 3 UN states and 1 unrecognized state on the same territory Sotho: 3 UN states Standard Chinese (Mandarin): 2 UN states and Taiwan Hindustani: 3 UN states (counting Fijian Hindi)
Some countries—like Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States—have no official language recognized as such at a national level. On the other extreme, Bolivia officially recognizes 37 languages, the most of any country in the world. Second to Bolivia is India with 22 official languages. South Africa is the country with the third lead with 11 official languages that all have equal status; Bolivia gives primacy to Spanish, and India gives primacy to English and Hindi.