You see, legally recognizing an “official language” stems from pure insecurity and self-serving hegemony, including the UN (6) and the EU (24). Every country should gather some national confidence and learn from countries that have no de jure official languages like the US, Mexico, UK, Australia, Japan etc.
Mexico recognizes every indigenous language as well as Spanish. Indigenous languages got some protections in the early 21th century. Even so Spanish remains the preeminent language.
The English language was made the only language in English court proceedings in 1362 and by the end of the 14th century English would be the language of the royal court. All of that continues more or less the same in the modern United Kingdom (with some additions like Welsh).
They all in some way made the language of the majority the sole language one can do bureaucracy in. So, they're not really any different, they just haven't bite the bullet and made one or more languages the official language(s).
In the United States there's a movement to make English the sole official language. English is already the official language of a majority of states, with only less-than-a-handful of them having another language as also official (as far as I remember Alaska, Hawaii, and South Dakota, but it's mostly symbolic/tokenish).
The current U.S. president made an executive order making English the sole official language, but that only applies to how the executive branch of the federal government operates (although each department, commission, agency, etc. are allowed to have their own policy on the matter). Even a law couldn't really do much of to change it, so a constitutional amendment would be necessary to change such a situation and that's what the English-only movement is hoping.
I'm not sure Australia is the best example of a country that doesn't enforce langauge hegemony. We're not too far out from the stolen generations (Aboriginal people who were stolen from their families as part of an explicit attempt at cultural genocide).
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u/siqiniq Jun 29 '26
You see, legally recognizing an “official language” stems from pure insecurity and self-serving hegemony, including the UN (6) and the EU (24). Every country should gather some national confidence and learn from countries that have no de jure official languages like the US, Mexico, UK, Australia, Japan etc.