[1] For the United Nations to select a language to be official, a majority of the 193 members need to vote in favor of it.
These conferences were meant to coordinate and plan the post-war world, including how to promote world peace in the aftermath of the war, how to facilitate global communication through an international auxiliary language (such as Esperanto) or an existing group of languages, and how to handle the decolonization of Africa and Asia.
In 1945, this culminated in the Charter of the UN, its constituent document signed at the San Francisco Conference, which did not expressly provide for official languages.
Unofficially, the UN held its operations in English and French; however, the Charter provided (in Article 111) that the five languages be equally authoritative.
[14][15][16] In 1980, the General Assembly got rid of this final distinction, making Arabic an official and working language of all its committees and subcommittees, as of 1 January 1982.
[17] As of 1983, the Security Council (like the General Assembly) recognized six official and working languages: Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish.
Secretary General Kofi Annan responded to these criticisms that full parity of the six official languages was unachievable within current budgetary restraints, but he nevertheless attached great importance to improving the linguistic balance and worked to increase parity between the existing 6 official languages.
In 2008 and 2009, resolutions of the General Assembly have urged the Secretariat to respect the parity of the six official languages, especially in the dissemination of public information.
A/RES/65/311 on multilingualism, calling on the secretary-general, once again, to ensure that all six official languages are given equally favourable working conditions and resources.
[27] The drive to improve parity and focus on multilingualism continued throughout the 2010s and led to the United Nations news and media website (https://news.un.org/en/) to begin including translations of its content into Hindi, Portuguese, and Swahili in 2018.
[28] In June 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on multilingualism that encouraged UN organizations to disseminate important communication and messages in official as well as non-official languages, similar to the semi-official policies proposed to Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon.
[31] Other UN documents and websites are also translated into Bengali (referred to as Bangla), French Creole, Indonesian/Malay, Turkish, and Urdu, but not on an official or consistent basis.
It is mutually intelligible to a high degree with Urdu which is official and spoken in Pakistan and together they are often considered the same language, referred to as Hindustani or Hindi–Urdu.
[39] In 2007, it was reported that the government of India would "make immediate diplomatic moves to seek the status of an official language for Hindi at the United Nations".
[40] According to a 2009 press release from its Ministry of External Affairs, the Government of India has been "working actively" to have Hindi recognized as an official language of the UN.
[41][42] In 2015, Nepal's Vice President Parmananda Jha stated his firm support for the inclusion of Hindi as an official language of the UN.
[44] It is a standardized variety of Malay,[45] an Austronesian language that has been used as a lingua franca in the multilingual Indonesian archipelago for centuries.
Many Lusophones have advocated for greater recognition of their language, which is widely spoken across four continents: Portugal (original place) in Europe; Brazil (the largest lusophone nation) in South America; Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe in Africa; Timor-Leste and Macau in Asia.
[50] It is one of the most commonly spoken languages in Africa, is a compulsory subject in all Kenyan and Tanzanian schools and is increasingly being used in eastern Burundi.
[citation needed] With between 150 and 200 million speakers, the Swahili lexicon is similar to that of other eastern Bantu languages such as Comorian, which have differing levels of mutual intelligibility.
The days and their historical significance are: UN independent agencies have their own sets of official languages that sometimes are different from that of the principal UN organs.
[72] For example, the General Conference of UNESCO has ten official languages including Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, and Portuguese.