![]() Hindi may be the most likely to gain status in the near future. With half of the world’s population still out of the loop, you would think there would be some push back. Less than half of the people in the world can understand the documents and agreements being issued from the highest international political body in the world. ![]() If we look at a list of the total speakers for each of the six official languages and add them up to get a rough estimate we’ll see that UN official languages account for less than half of the world’s population. Okay, so maybe there are only six languages at the UN, but they’re such common and geographically diverse languages that most people in the world will speak at least one of them anyways, right? Not quite. Arabic managed to negotiate its way to being an official language by having the Arabic-speaking members of the UN agree to pay the costs of introducing the language for three years.A few years later, Chinese achieved the status of a working language, following on the heels of the People’s Republic of China being recognized as a permanent member of the Security Council after Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 to ease tensions with the communist country.Russian became a working language of both the assembly and the council in 1968-1969 following the Brezhnev Doctrine, a doctrine that asserted the right of the Soviet Union to intervene abroad.The other languages of the UN were also gradually introduced as working languages to the General Assembly and Security Council, often coinciding with major political happenings: The difference is that working languages are the languages of “day-to-day professional exchanges” while the official languages are the languages in which all official documents must be written. The second thing to notice here is that, until 1948 when Spanish was added, only English and French were the working languages of both the General Assembly and the Security Council. Presumably Spanish was included because it’s the second most spoken language in the world by native speakers. First of all, besides Spanish, all of these languages can be matched directly to permanent members of the Security Council who hold veto power (the U.S., Britain, China, Russia and France), which is to say that the languages that became official languages were the languages of the most politically influential and powerful nations in post-war period. There are a couple things to unpack here. In 1946, just following the establishment of the UN, all of the current official languages except Arabic were adopted as official languages, and English and French were adopted as working languages. ![]() ![]() However, there’s also a clear political history behind the choice of these six languages. (Download) What Are the 6 Official Languages of the United Nations?Īs you most likely already gleaned from the title of this article, there are in fact six languages used officially at the United Nations: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.įor the most part, these languages being the official ones makes sense, since they include some of the most widely spoken languages in the world. What Are the 6 Official Languages of the United Nations?ĭownload: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that youĬan take anywhere.So if you’re asking yourself, “ what language should I learn?” maybe one of the 6 official UN languages may be the right choice for you. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, as they say. It’s the gold standard not only of diplomacy, but of linguistic skills. People interested in languages also tend to be people interested in international affairs.Īnd for people interested in the international affairs, the UN tends to be seen as a gleaming castle on a hill. By Alex Breeden Last updated: NovemThe 6 Official UN Languages and How To Make Them Into a Career
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