Despite the United States of America being the epicenter of English speakers for that side of the world, it oddly enough doesn’t have it as its official language.
Something you rarely give a second thought to is a country's official language.
As a rule, you tend to speak the most commonly spoken language of the country you reside in. In turn, you assume the most popular language is the official one.
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If this was your thinking, you would be right about 92 percent of the time as 180 countries have an official language and more than 100 have multiple official languages.
However, if you applied this thinking in the U.S. and assumed the official language was English, you would be wrong.
In fact, the U.S. doesn’t even have ANY language as its official language - as hard as that is to believe.
To understand why, we have to take a bit of a trip down memory lane to 18th century and the founding of the United States of America.
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Most countries choose to adopt an official language to establish an official means of communication between its people and officials, ultimately making it easier to introduce laws and rights.
As well as this, it serves a social purpose as it can be used to preserve a cultural identity and create national unity.
However, when the US was founded, the idea that there should be an official language, like English, irked some people and conflicted with the idea of what the country was founded upon, individual liberty and equality.
In the 1770s, English was the most prominent language throughout the American colonies, however, many people spoke a multitude of languages, notably the countries in Europe that they had come from.
This meant there were swathes of people in the U.S. who spoke German, Dutch, Flemish, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Gaelic, Portuguese, Italian, as well as English.
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Fears had arisen that due to the fact that the country was made of migrants who spoke a bunch of different languages, it may prove unfair or divisive to pick only English as the official language.
Throughout history, people have campaigned for English to officially be instilled as the official language for the entire country, but has regularly proved unsuccessful.
“People in the U.S. communicate in more than 350 languages,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
And, other than English, some of the most popular spoken languages are Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Arabic.
Topics: News, US News, World News, Politics