Official Languages and Multilingual States

An official language is one designated by law for use in a state's government, courts, and public administration, a status distinct from a "national language," which may carry symbolic or cultural weight without necessarily having the same administrative function, and distinct again from languages that are simply widely spoken de facto without any formal legal status at all. India illustrates the complexity these categories can produce in practice: its 1950 Constitution designates Hindi in the Devanagari script and English as the two languages of union government business, contrary to the common misconception that Hindi alone is India's single "national language," a status the Constitution in fact assigns to no single language, while the Eighth Schedule separately lists 22 languages, including Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Urdu, and Punjabi, that receive constitutional recognition and are eligible for use and promotion within their respective states and union territories.