In India, one of the world’s most polyglot countries, the government wants more than a billion people to embrace Hindi. One scholar thinks that would be a loss.
What’s the maximum number of first-class-official languages that are usable for all official use and actually equal in stature?
Belgium has French and Flemish, though they’re essentially partitioned by region (i.e. in practice, you can’t rely on Flemish in Wallonia or French in Flanders). The language blocs have their own separate political parties and everything, and have the bare minimum amount to do with each other, like a divorced couple who can’t afford to move.
The UK recognises Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, though they’re only used in their geographic areas (and even there, you get periodic cockups like some monolingual anglophone pasting a Google Translate error into the Welsh part of a sign).
Ireland seems to be making a reasonable fist of having English and Irish; most business is conducted in English, though pretty much every Irish citizen learns Irish in school and spends a few months in the gaeltacht where English is not spoken, so I’d venture that the sorts of errors seen in Wales wouldn’t occur there.
Sweden, meanwhile, has five official languages you can conduct any official business in; they include Sami, Yiddish and Romani, though not English, which almost everyone of working age speaks to a reasonable level. I imagine that dealing with the government in English would probably be easier than doing so in Romani, if those were your two choices.
Not sure about Canada and Switzerland, but I get the impression that they’re geographically partitioned, if perhaps not as much as Belgium. In Canada, packaging seems to be bilingual by law, though Québec is aggressively francophone, with STOP signs reading ARRÉT and bans on English-language signage, whereas elsewhere, everyone speaks English. In Switzerland, meanwhile, there’s a sharp line between the French and German-speaking parts, which is sometimes called the “Rösti ditch”, and the Alps divide the German- and Italian-speaking parts. Meanwhile, more people primarily speak English than the fourth official language, Rhaeto-Romansch.
So from the above, I’m guessing that after about two languages at most, the country partitions into language regions which develop their own cultures, and ultimately economies and political orders.
Ireland seems to be making a reasonable fist of having English and Irish; most business is conducted in English […]
Historically, that’s mostly because of colonial rule by the English government.
For decades (if not centuries) the Irish language was severely suppressed and might have even died out, if not for the continued efforts by the Irish people to preserve their language and cultural identity.
A combination of the introduction of state funded […] primary education, from 1831, in which Irish was omitted from the curriculum till 1878, and only then added as a curiosity, to be learnt after English, Latin, Greek and French […]. The National Schools run by the Roman Catholic Church discouraged its use until about 1890.
It’s only quite recently that Irish has become an official language in Ireland:
In July 2003, the Official Languages Act was signed, declaring Irish an official language, requiring public service providers to make services available in the language […]
Of course, the fact that Ireland is trading a lot with the UK and other countries in the anglosphere and EU, is a reason to keep English as a major language.
I think that there’s no hard limit. Each official language might add a bit of an additional cost to the government, but that cost is relatively small in comparison with the social and political benefits - including stability.
Eventually speakers of each language end clustered together, as you said near the end. But that’s fine, too; a population (subjects of a country) doesn’t need to coincide with a people (individuals sharing a common identity).
What’s the maximum number of first-class-official languages that are usable for all official use and actually equal in stature?
So from the above, I’m guessing that after about two languages at most, the country partitions into language regions which develop their own cultures, and ultimately economies and political orders.
Your dataset is a bit biased towards countries of the Global North.
South Africa for example has 12 official languages.
Senegal has French as official language, but very few actually understand it.
The EU is not a country, but it has a parliament with most languages being live-translated.
Historically, that’s mostly because of colonial rule by the English government.
For decades (if not centuries) the Irish language was severely suppressed and might have even died out, if not for the continued efforts by the Irish people to preserve their language and cultural identity.
It’s only quite recently that Irish has become an official language in Ireland:
Of course, the fact that Ireland is trading a lot with the UK and other countries in the anglosphere and EU, is a reason to keep English as a major language.
German is also an official language in Belgium
I think that there’s no hard limit. Each official language might add a bit of an additional cost to the government, but that cost is relatively small in comparison with the social and political benefits - including stability.
Eventually speakers of each language end clustered together, as you said near the end. But that’s fine, too; a population (subjects of a country) doesn’t need to coincide with a people (individuals sharing a common identity).