National and official languagesExam

National and official languages
Example 2
Vanuatu is a multilingual Pacific republic consisting of about 80 islands with a population of around 180,000. It declared independence from a joint British and French colonial administration in 1980. Vanuatu is unique in the Pacific because it has adopted a non-European language, and a former pidgin, Bislama, as its sole national language. Bislama is an English-lexified creole with origins in a melanisian plantation pidgin. It is an evaluable lingua franca in Vanuatu, and a very politically acceptable national language.
In resolving the issue of the relative status of Spanish and Guarani, the Paraguayan government used two different terms; national language and official language. in sociolinguistics the distinction between a national language and an official language is generally made along the effecctive referential dimension, or more precisely in this context, the ideological-instrumental dimension. A national language is the language of a political, cultural and social unit. It is generally develoved and used as a symbol of national unity. Its fucntions are to identify the nation and unite its people. An official language, by contrast, is simply a language which may be used for government business. Its function is primarily utilitarian rather than symbolic. It is possible, of cause, for one language to serve both functions.
Not surprisingly, governments do not always recognise the distinctions made by sociolinguists. They use the terms official and national to suit their political ends, as the Paraguayan case illustrates. In Paraguayan the government declared both Guarani and Spanish to be national languages, while Spanish was also identified as an official language. in other countries, such as Tanzania, just rhe reverse is found. There is one national language, Swahili, but two official languages, Swahili and English. Similarly, in Vanuatu, the national language is Bislama, a Pacific creole, and it is also an official language alongside French and English, the languages of the previuos colonial administrators. Many countries make no distinction between a national language and an official language. in countries which regard themselves as monolingual nations, the same language serves both purpose. In multilingual communities, however, all kinds of permutations have been used in order to satisfy both political and social goals on the one hand, and more practical and utilitarian needs on the other.
In multilingual countries, the government ogten declares a particular languange to be the national language for political reasons. The declaration may be a step in the process of asserting the nationhood of newly independent or establishead nation, for intance, as in the case of Swahili in Tanzania, Hebrew in Israel, Malay in Malaysia, and Indonesia in Indonesia. Where this national language cannot serve all the internal and external functions of government business, however, it has then been necessary to identify one or more official languages as well. So French is an official language in many countries, such as Zaire, the Ivory Coast and Chad, where French was perviously a colonial power, and Arabic is an official language in Israel alongside Hebrew.
The identification of official languages may also be necessary when the choice of naional language is problematic. In multilingual India, for example, attempts to give Hindi sole status as the national language have not succeeded. Fourteen regional India languages are recognised as official languages alongside English and Hindi for the counrty as a whole, and in addition different states each have their own official languages. Telegu, for instance, is the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh. Like Paraguay, other countries have nominated more than one national language. Zaire, for instance has four African languages as national languages, Lingala, Swahili, Tshiluba, and kikongo, but only one official language, French. In haiti, the 1983 constitution declared Haitian Creole a national language alongside French, but there too French serves as the only official language.