The Linguist’s Calendar: June 15

Location of Galicia in Spain

June 15

1983: The local government of Galicia in Spain proclaims Galician the official language of the region.










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Here is an bonus bit for today from Mikael Parkvall's Limits of Language:


MOST OFFICIAL LANGUAGEOf the world’s 6 000 or so languages, only about 113 are recognized as official in any country. 14 of these have this status in two countries, and 13 are official in three or more countries. The most common official language by far is English (73), followed by French (39), Arabic (25), Spanish (21), Portuguese (8) and German (6).

About two-thirds of the world’s countries specify an official language in their constitution. For a few of those which do not—including Britain and Israel—this is due to them not having a written constitution in
the first place! For others, such as the United States, and Sweden, the de facto official language is so only by virtue of tradition rather than legislation (and the constitution itself is written in English and Swedish respectively). The above figure also includes countries in which one language or the other is official only by practice.
 
English is also the world’s most official language in another sense. The combined number of inhabitants of countries having English as their official language is a staggering 2 100 millions (almost half of them in India). No other language is able to challenge this position, the closest competitors being Mandarin and Hindi/Urdu, each with slightly more than half that number. Next follow Spanish and French, both with between 300 and 400 million “official” speakers. 

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