Countries without an Official Language

The subject of which countries do not have an official language, may be a topic of interest for Lawyers, experts in constitutions, and may be interesting for other people when they are enjoying some time in a social Meeting.  But, when the Top member of the list of those countries is the USA, a country that is going through a very controversial election, and this topic can be used as a sensitive point of the debates of the campaign, then it starts to attract some attention from Media and from the general public.  

Here is a definition of what is an official language. According to the Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language and posted in Wikipedia.org, “is a language that is given a special legal status in a particular country, state, or other jurisdiction. Typically a country's official language refers to the language used within government (e.g., courts, parliament, administration)”  

An Official Language is used by the government at different areas, has to be accepted by the constitution or the law and not necessarily is the language that people represented by that government use in their everyday life. When the government uses a language without specify it in the laws, we are talking about a “De Facto” official language. For more details, please refer to a Lawyer or somebody who is expert in the area of Constitutional law. 

Still, there are a few countries that do not have an official language. As it was mention before, the United States of America is one of them. The main language in use in this Country is English. But the US constitution does not mention any language as official. Although no official language exists at federal level, there are states of the union that has declared English as their official language. According to http://www.usenglish.org/ The state of West Virginia became the No 32^nd   State to declare English as Official Language. There are groups that are proposing to make English the official language of the US at Federal level. There is still some resistance to this. According to http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_lang.html  some people believe that such declaration may be against the US constitution, and would make life more difficult for Non English speakers who live in the US. As example, they show the fact that Non-English speakers would be deprived of the right of a due process, especially in the court where no interpreting services would be offered.

There are 7 more countries in my list. Please, bear in mind that this list is composed of countries that I know they do not have an official language. This list may not be completed. 

The United Kingdom of the Great Britain uses English as its main language but has not an official language. There are some historical and Demographic reasons that might explain why the UK does not to have an official language, but perhaps the main reason is that it is not needed. People still uses English in their everyday life and is the language used by the government. There are no visible threats to this language. Many people don’t know that English law has still some old articles that were composed in Anglo-Norman French and Latin. The official Motto of the monarchy is in French (“Dieu et mon droit”).

Australia: this country has English as its main language and uses It at all level. But the Australian constitution does not say a word about any language to be used as official.

Japan: The language in use is Japanese. But the constitution does not specify any official language. According to www.houko.com that is the database of Japanese laws, and then http://www.mutantfrog.com/2010/06/01/what-is-japans-national-language/ where an interpretation is given, Japanese law only specify that Japanese language must be used in the court of justice. Japan is the only country that I did not find in of the lists I reviewed to make this article. An answer to another article from a writer alerted me about Japanese case. It is interesting to know also that while Japanese government does not have an official language, it invests time and money to regulate the kanjis to be used (Kanjis are the adopted Chinese characters in use in modern Japanese writing).

Mexico: This country is the one who has the biggest Spanish speaker community in the world. But is likely that speakers of the language of Cervantes would be very surprised to learn that this country does not recognize this language as official. Mexico recognizes equal status to indigenous languages and Spanish but none of them is declared as official.  It is interesting that if you search in Google questioning in English about the existence of an official language in Mexico, a lot of articles will say that is Spanish. Once you ask the question in Spanish, you will face a lot of articles from different forums discussing the fact that Mexico does not have an official language.  I will just select an article to mention here: one was as recent as http://www.la-verdad.com.mx/ausencia-idioma-oficial-mexico-realidad-52200.html that was just published on August 7^th 2016.

Uruguay: Although in many websites it is said that this country has Spanish as its official language, the constitution of Uruguay does not mention any official languages. There are historical reasons for this. According to the current education law, Uruguay has 3 languages: Spanish, Uruguayan Portuguese, also known as “Portuñol” and the sign language.

Mauritius:  This is a very multilingual country. According to the website http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---protrav/---ilo_aids/documents/legaldocument/wcms_126778.pdf in its article 49, the constitution of Mauritius only establishes the use of English as the language of the national assembly for parliamentary procedures. But there is no official language. The rest of government can be addressed in French. Most of its population speaks Mauritian Creole, based in French. English is the most used language in Education while French is predominant in the media.

Eritrea: There is no official language in Eritrea. There are 9 languages According to http://www.eritrea.be/old/eritrea-languages.htm the most common are Tigriniya and Arabic. English is widely used by the government and in the higher education system.

Here is the end of my list. To prepare it, I researched on other lists existing in the Internet. This is the reason I cannot say it is complete. It is a surprise to see that there are many different lists with different countries listed. I made searches using different languages like English, Spanish, French, Esperanto and Italian, and in each language I found a different list with different countries. As I said, Japan was not in any of them. USA and the UK were present in almost all the pages related with this subject that I visited. Then, the countries I found were researched separately trying to find more information in government related websites, having access to different articles of the constitution of each country. Most of the countries listed where then discarded when I discovered that indeed those countries have an official language.  Most of the countries that do not have an official language have some historical reasons for this. Then, if they do not see any threat to the language, they do not do much to change.