Surprisingly, there is no law declaring English the official language of the UK.
In fact, English is just the de facto official language of the UK, which means it is not legally sanctioned as official but spoken by the majority.
England and Scotland do not have any official languages. Northern Ireland’s official languages are English and Irish.
Welsh and English are the official languages of Wales
“The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 recognises that Welsh and English are official languages” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Language_(Wales)_Measure_2011
The linked article
and your Wikipedia link bothstates that only Welsh is recognised by Wales as an official language.Edit. Apologies, your quote is further down. It’s appears I’m wrong, and Wales do recognise English.
Same with the US, no official language.
A good addendum to this is that the recognition of Irish as an official language in Northern Ireland only happened last year (may, 2022) with the passing of the The Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Bill
It’s likely only recognized in Northern Ireland and Wales because they’d already supresed Gaelic out of the Scots. England itself doesn’t need English listed as a language because the ruling class never tried to stamp another language/culture out of Englad they way have Scotland, Ireland, or Wales.
Loads of stuff in the UK is not set into law but rather into custom iirc. So instead of “because the law says so” they have a bunch of “because we’ve always done it this way”.
Doesn’t sound right to me. As someone living in Scotland, my understanding is that the Scottish Government recognises 4 official languages: Scots, English, Gaelic, and BSL.
Edit: Wikipedia lists those 4 as official languages in Scotland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Scotland
I’d known that about the US, but always assumed that England had English as the official language.
Mind you, the aristocracy and royalty spoke French for 200 years so I’m wondering whether English, or French come to that, was ever the official language.
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