Talk:List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized as an official language

Sinhalese language
Why is Sinhalese in the list if it's only official in one single country, Sri Lanka? I'm going to delete that language from the list. Also, since both Serbo-Croatian and Swahili are both official in five countries, I'm going to place them higher in the list, after Russian. --Apolo13 (talk) 13:35, 9 September 2016 (UTC

Quechua
According to the Wikipedia article, the Quechua language is official no only in Peru and Bolivia, but also in Ecuador. Since it's official in 3 languages, I'll add it to the main list.--Apolo13 (talk) 13:48, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

I made a lot of edits
Lots of incorrect rankings. Indian languages that aren't recognised as official nationally has been counted as so, and lots of other minor mistakes. I've cleaned up as much as I can- the list could be missing some that weren't there to begin with though. J43437 (talk) 22:05, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Indian languages
According to Wikipedia articles, Hindustani languages has status in India and Pakistan only. Tamil is the only language in the Indian subcontinent which has official 3 countries (which means more than 2 countries) in Sri Lanka, India and Singapore. It also hase recognized as minority language in many countries such as Malaysia, Mauritius, South Africa and Reunion. Removing it by replacing unwanted sources are considered vandalizing this article or page. Please don't vandalize this page by editing Hindustani languages in those list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JudeBob123 (talk • contribs) 12:53, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Fiji Hindi is an official language of Fiji, if you see fit to remove correct information without explanation, then you can expect your edit to be removed. Hzh (talk) 13:41, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
 * All Hindi language documents on Fijian government websites are translated into standard Hindi.
 * The term Fiji Hindi is only found in one part of the Fijian Constitution where it is stated that: "(3) Conversational and contemporary iTaukei and Fiji Hindi languages shall be taught as compulsory subjects in all primary schools."
 * However all official documents (including the Constitution) are translated into standard Hindi.
 * Examples:
 * The Constitution
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20160909195751/http://www.fiji.gov.fj/getattachment/5912a2ce-0260-4df5-98b9-955360cd3aad/Click-here-to-download-the-Fiji-Constitution-(Hind.aspx
 * The Prime Minister's Statement on Covid
 * https://www.fiji.gov.fj/getattachment/92b963e7-5c26-43b9-a1d0-885adf80985a/PM-Bainimarama-s-Statement-on-COVID-19-in-Hindi-20.aspx
 * These are both in Standard Hindi. Ahassan05 (talk) 01:22, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Sources needed
Please add sources for the edits. Some entries are dubious as to whether they are an official language or not, and it is hard to judge without sources to justify their addition here. Hzh (talk) 14:00, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Danish listed as official in more than two countries
One problem: Danish is the official language of the Kingdom of Denmark. This Kingdom of Denmark includes both the Faroe Islands and Greenland. If these (autonomous countries) are to be listed as seperate countries, the constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (i. e. Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten) have to be treated the same. This would make Dutch official in 6 countries and on three continents. The more reasonable approach, IMO, is to remove Danish from the list of languages which are official in more than two countries. The current list has to be changed. What do you think? Quanstizium (talk) 17:37, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Duplicate table
This article is basically a duplicate of the table at, and they don't exactly match. It seems there are three options: Comments? —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 04:09, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
 * 1) They should be reconciled into one, transcluded table, or
 * 2) The table should be removed from the other article (leaving just the link to this one), or
 * 3) This article should be deleted (after being used to reconcile the other one)

I think that the other article should have a link to this one, considering that this (in my opinion) deserves a standalone article/list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zoozaz1 (talk • contribs) 18:53, 28 March 2019 (UTC)


 * The same table (more or less) is also at the bottom of List of official languages by country and territory (after the main table). I agree that consolidating in one place is a good idea, and that may as well be the stand-alone article List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized as an official language. Section transcluding this would then be fine (so, option 1 in the list above). Klbrain (talk) 21:17, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
 * If we are to keep these lists we should definitley consolodate them and I think a transcluded table would be the best way to do it. I'm not sure though if this should be kept at all though due to inherrent problems with WP:VERIFIABILITY and WP:NOR in creating a list including "de facto offcial" languages. If we were only to include de jure official languages the result be very strange with the UK and US not being counted as countries with English as an official language, which is likley not what readers are looking for.
 * The article also cites no sources with many figures that could easily be challenged meaning that basically everything should be sourced and there should be a well defined inclusion requirement. Some examples I found in 5 minutes researching this topic include Hindustani language saying it's official in 5 countries while this list says 2 which is weird since this list also include de facto official languages and Togo is listed as having Hausa as an official language but according to the source used in Togo(https://www.ethnologue.com/country/TG/languages) it isn't one of the 39 most important languages. This is before looking at all the problems reported at Talk:List of official languages. Encylopedic content must be verifiable and if we can't find a way to make this dubious article verifiable it shouldn't be included in the encyclopedia. Trialpears (talk) 21:56, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

The following is a work table containing a merge of the tables from the three articles mentioned. The row below each group will contain notes regarding the discrepancies between them which need to be resolved (TBD after I get some sleep ).


 * The first column (#) is a sequence number I assigned for convenience while working on it. #s not ending in 0 are not originally in any of the 3 article tables (i.e. from the 2-3 list below, etc.)
 * The 'X' column indicates which of the three articles the row came from:
 * 'a': List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized as an official language – '%' at the end means it was not in the table but instead in the "2-3 countries" list below it. Hausa and Sotho were erroneously in the bottom list as well as the table.
 * 'b': List of official languages by country and territory – '%' at the end means it was not in the table but instead in the "2 countries" list below it (Cantonese has 3).
 * 'c': List of official languages – Aymara & Quechua has been split into separate rows. Songhay-Zarma has been split into separate rows.
 * 'y': Reconciled results
 * 'z': Progress/comments
 * '*' are disputed status territories

(edited) —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 02:18, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

In support of rich footnotes
It's my own feeling that this page can kill two birds with one stone by providing richer footnotes where appropriate, as a quick entry point to the related issues. To that end, I expanded the gloss on English in the United States as follows:

In America, English is the language of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the The Federalist Papers and remains the working language of the federal administration. At the state level, some states with large Hispanic populations—such as Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas—provide bilingual legislated notices and official documents in both Spanish and English. Attempts have been made to legislate English as the official language of the federal government of the United States, often imbued with nationalist sentiment such as the proposed English Language Unity Act of 2005 with its controversial ties to immigration policy, but these initiatives have not passed into law, despite an English-only movement whose long history includes: Pennsylvania of the 1750s concerning German; the decade of the 1800s in Louisiana concerning French; the 1890s concerning the use of the Hawaiian language in Hawaii; and from 1880 onward—more formally organized—more than a century of American Indian boarding schools suppressing the use of Native American indigenous language.

My goal here was primarily to name the other contested languages, each one within its own small context, these being Spanish, German, French, Hawaiian, and indigenous languages.

A page such as this one functions best as both a top-level survey and additionally a quick jumping off point for specific refinements—if only confined to somewhat meaty footnotes (yes, I know my final sentence with its long arms ran to over 100 words, condensed as these things sometimes are).

I'm generally a one-pass editor, so this is merely a suggested edit, and I'll leave it to other to accept, reject, or modify as the community sees fit. &mdash; MaxEnt 15:50, 22 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Half of the time, I don't figure out what I'm doing until after I've done it. The page title here is "list of" and from that perspective my meaty footnote might seem superfluous. But what I actually did—subconsciously—is map my understanding of the proper use of data visualization (see The Visual Display of Quantitative Information). With data visualization, you almost always face methodological choices that can subtly influence the story presented. The only recourse is to be honest about your choices in the associated footnotes. Similarly, a mere "list" is not entirely a neutral document. Historically, America has defended the use of English as the primary language of government in nearly every way other than by granting English a legislative primacy, in much the same way that Christianity is not the formal religion of the United States, despite Christianity being baked-into their social order as deeply as any other country you can name.
 * Uniquely in America, this is less a distinction of political will than a distinction of how political will is best codified according to the American tradition, so as to be remain as secular as possible around the margins of centrist political will, per its founding charter. To say English is not the official language of the United States is true enough to win a round of Jeopardy, but it falls a full brick short of clue in nearly any larger context. As I see this, there's a lot of meat on the bones concerning the question of just how official English is as a language within the American context.
 * So you have a giant landscape painting hung on a prominent wall for 250 years with sticky blue stuff, and then you go "maybe we really should finally screw it to the wall in case of an earthquake" only it turns out that the founding father mixed an extremely peculiar batch of plaster when those walls were first installed, and the use of a screw turns out to be anything but the simple matter it might have first appeared to be. Should this page be "list of paintings hung by proper plaster screws" and make no mention of adhesion by eternal Blu Tack or should it comment on the strange political plaster where and as necessary? &mdash; MaxEnt 16:38, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

List criteria needed to resolve Tamil and other questions
There needs to be a conversation about exactly what this article is about; selection criteria need to be clearly defined to specify what is in and out of scope for this article.

Case in point: is India a country in which Tamil is "recognized as an official language"? I believe it is, but another editor has been warring to remove India from the list of countries where Tamil is official. (My reasoning is based on Constitution Schedule 8 which mentions it, along with 21 others.)

List articles need to have selection criteria, and this article particularly needs to have criteria to be precisely defined. Is this the article about the "List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized everywhere in the country as an official language", or is this the article about the "List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized somewhere in the country as an official language"? Without a specification one way or the other, my reading is that languages recognized by the country in its national laws or constitution as official anywhere meet the criterion of the title. Case in point: the recent edit warring to remove "India" from the list of countries where Tamil is official. On the one hand, only two languages are official nationwide, but 22 languages are official in specific regions according to the Constitution. For example: Tamil is the official language in Tamil Nadu State, and not because it was declared so at the state level, but because it is declared so in the Constitution of India. So: is India a country in which Tamil "is recognized as an official language" or not?

The same question applies to many other countries, such as Spain. For the purposes of this article, is Spain "a country in which Catalan is recognized as an official language", or not? I would say "yes", because article 3, § 2 of the Spanish Constitution recognizes it as co-official for Catalonia, but only Spanish is official nationally. (Spain has four constitutionally recognized official languages, as does Switzerland. India has 22, listed in Schedule 8.)

For both the India case (Tamil), the Spain case (Catalan), and many other countries we need to define what the list criteria are so we know what belongs in this article, and what doesn't. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 20:29, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Another way to look at the Tamil situation, is to ask what have other editors been assuming about what the scope of the article is with respect to countries where other languages besides Tamil are official? Some examples:
 * For "French":
 * Switzerland is listed as one of the countries where French is official. But it is spoken and used administratively mostly in the west, near France.
 * Canada is also listed as one of the countries where French is official, but few people speak or use it in western Canada or the maritimes.
 * For "Italian": Switzerland is listed as one one of the countries where Italian is official, but it's not used much outside Ticino in the south.
 * For "Dutch": Belgium is listed as one one of the countries where Dutch is official, but few outside Flanders in the north speak or use it.
 * For "German": Belgium is listed as one one of the countries where German is official, even though it's less than 1% of the country and is rarely used anywhere else.
 * I'm not sure why any of those should add to the tally of countries where French, Dutch, or German are recognized as official, but Tamil is not. Mathglot (talk) 02:22, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
 * In all of those examples the language in question is an official language at the national level. Languages in the Eighth Schedule are recognised as having significance, but are not national languages. CMD (talk) 08:36, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Article title matters: if this were the "List of languages by the number of countries in which they are recognized as an official NATIONAL language" then I'd agree with you, 100%; but it's not. German is official in Belgium, even though it's not a national language there, and likewise for the other examples above. Tamil is official in India, even though it's not a national language there, so how is that any different? The confusion arises from the lack of explicit list criteria, so anyone can interpret list membership however they want: this way for Belgium, and that way for India. Mathglot (talk) 17:09, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
 * German is a national language in Belgium, and likewise for the others above. Tamil does not have that national status (so to speak), much like English in Malaysia, Hawaiian in the United States, Chechen in Russia, and other places where a regional language has official recognition but is not an official language of the whole nation. CMD (talk) 00:37, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
 * In what way do you consider German a "national language"? It is spoken by only a fragment of Belgians; hardly "national", in my understanding of the term. Mathglot (talk) 17:44, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
 * In the sense that it is considered as such by law. CMD (talk) 21:27, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Okay, I kinda thought so; so you meant official. Clearly official (which occurs in the title of this article) and national (which does not) are two different things, and very much part of why we're in such a pickle in this article in the first place. Conflating the two on the Talk page, just makes it harder to talk about without tripping over ourselves. Mathglot (talk) 02:06, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I meant what I wrote. You can have languages that are official at subnational levels. However, in Belgium's case, German is official at the national level, as a language of the country/nation. CMD (talk) 11:48, 14 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Comment: Some sources that quote the Indian Constitution and mention Schedule 8 state that Tamil is among "official languages" in India.
 * Criteria should be things like: Is the language used on all road signs throughout the country? Can one demand that court proceedings use the language throughout the country? Can one demand that local government forms can be completed in the language throughout the country?  For Tamil the answer is no, for all three. For Dutch in Belgium, and all 3 Swiss languages  it is yes. Not sure about the others. Your "For "Dutch": Belgium is listed as one one of the countries where Dutch is official, but few outside Flanders in the north speak or use it", is absurdly biased - there are more native Dutch speakers than French-speakers, and Flanders contains 68% of the Belgian population. It would be rather less inaccurate to turn the statement on its head: "Belgium is listed as one one of the countries where French is official, but few outside the south and Brussels speak or use it". The same for all 3 Swiss languages. It is normally much easier to use English than the "wrong" national language in both countries. Johnbod (talk) 13:46, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The road signs criterion is an interesting one; not sure how easy it would be to verify. A cursory check of road sign images in Kerala, Gujarat, and Karnataka shows plenty of bilingual road signs (English + regional language), many monolingual (regional only); and I didn't see any that included Hindi. (I didn't check every one, and Commons images are not an unbiased sample.) Apparently, road sign language can also be a political hot button issue in India, and may even cause mass protests. That might make it a tricky one to use as a criterion.
 * The court language issue is an interesting one as well. Verification should be possible, but may be tedious, as there appears to be variation not only by state, but by jurisdiction. I checked Gujarat, expecting to find two (Gujarati + Hindi), or maybe three (also English), but was surprised to find that the rules are different, depending on the court. I just fear that both of these proposed criteria, while they make sense to me, might be too difficult to easily verify in order to be part of the list criteria. But I'm willing (even eager) to be proved wrong, if someone can demonstrate otherwise.
 * This is pretty much o/t, but my previous comment about Belgium is accurate, and unbiased. Your comment about the number of Dutch speakers is correct but your "less inaccurate" statement about French speakers is not; there is a large asymmetry in L2 language ability in Belgium, with a clear majority of Flemish people also speaking French (and English), whereas only a small fraction of Walloons speak any Dutch at all (nor much English, either). This is a cause of annoyance among many Flamands who have no choice but to speak French if they want to communicate with most of their southern neighbors. The situation in Switzerland is different, with German dominant as far as sheer number of native speakers, and even though there are far more polyglots there (many speak fr-de-it-en), English is more and more the major L2 language, even for communicating among Swiss from different regions, and there is very little annoyance in any region about using a non-native language with other Swiss. Mathglot (talk) 18:58, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Hindi in Fiji
The Hindi used in official documents in Fiji is standard Hindi.

Examples: The Constitution https://web.archive.org/web/20160909195751/http://www.fiji.gov.fj/getattachment/5912a2ce-0260-4df5-98b9-955360cd3aad/Click-here-to-download-the-Fiji-Constitution-(Hind.aspx

The Prime Minister's Statement on Covid https://www.fiji.gov.fj/getattachment/92b963e7-5c26-43b9-a1d0-885adf80985a/PM-Bainimarama-s-Statement-on-COVID-19-in-Hindi-20.aspx

These are both in standard Hindi.

The term Fiji Hindi is only found in one part of the Fijian Constitution where it is stated that: "(3) Conversational and contemporary iTaukei and Fiji Hindi languages shall be taught as compulsory subjects in all primary schools."

The written standard of Hindi in official Fijian government documents and websites is standard Hindi. Fiji Hindi also exists just as Patois and standard English co-exist in Jamaica.

It is factually incorrect to say that standard Hindi does not have official recognition in Fiji. Ahassan05 (talk) 01:33, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Hindi in Fiji
Hi,

I don't understand why Fiji keeps being removed from Hindustani. All official government documents are in standard Hindi.

I understand that Fiji Hindi and standard Hindi are different.

I understand that the Fijian Constitution has a clause that says that Fiji Hindi should be taught in schools. But the official translation of the Fijian Constitution is in standard Hindi.

On a factual basis, the constitution of Fiji calls for translation of documents into Hindi, and currently those documents that are translated are translated into standard Hindi.

I have given the examples from the website of the government of Fiji, and all the examples of documents are in standard Hindi. It makes no sense to say that standard Hindi is not being used as an official language in Fiji, when all the documents on government websites are in standard Hindi. Ahassan05 (talk) 12:41, 17 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Someone has left a note stating:
 * "The Fiji Hindi actually share very limited common traits with India's standard Hindi in both phonetics and vocabulary as it was based on a different local variant of Eastern Hindi (standard Hindi is derived from Western Hindi), and their speakers are unable to communicate with each other without learning it. Hence they cannot be considered the same language"
 * This is false. They are incredibly close. Anyone who speaks Hindi or Urdu can immediately understand Fiji Hindi.
 * Here are three videos of official use of Fiji Hindi:
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt6pOvo0Pvk
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIZI1Qb-Bxo
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiLSGlk-MOc
 * In these three videos every single word used exists and is readily understood in standard Hindi and Urdu. The only differences that a person would note are in the possessive pronouns, hamar instead of hamara and apan instead of apna (but both are common in spoken Hindi and Urdu in India and would be readily understood by anyone). The first video is completely identical to standard Hindi.
 * Fiji Hindi and standard Hindi/Urdu are completely mutually intelligible.
 * Here is a fourth video of a person speaking Fiji Hindi:
 * https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ybUyIa41grI
 * Again the only difference is the difference in pronunciation between apna and apan. This is a smaller difference than between using you and y'all in English.
 * Here is a fifth video:
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7kR1plfAxI
 * In this video again every single word is identical to standard Hindi except hamara is replaced by hamar, and the future conjugation of switches from the plural karege to the singular karega. This is again something one could hear in a Bollywood movie. It is worth noting that a third of women use hamara instead of hamar as would be common for Urdu speakers.
 * The idea that these languages are not mutually intelligible is not grounded in reality. Ahassan05 (talk) 14:52, 17 August 2023 (UTC)