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Topic: Official languages: in the constitution, in a statute, or nowhere at all

How does India mark Official languages: in the constitution, in a statute, or nowhere at all?

Everyday topic

India is the only one of these seven markets whose constitution devotes a whole Part to language. Article 343(1): the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script, and the numerals for official purposes of the Union shall be the international form of Indian numerals. That even the choice of numeral forms is written into the constitution says something about how concrete the arguments were. Clause (2) then sets a fifteen-year transition: for fifteen years from the commencement of the constitution, English continues to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used before. That fifteen-year clause is the pivotal design in Indian language politics — it wrote in an endpoint, and what actually happened as the endpoint approached produced further legislation and amendment. The Part also handles the official languages of the states, the language of communication between one state and another, and the language of the Supreme Court and the High Courts. Next to the one-sentence settlements of Indonesia and Brazil, India is not answering "which language" but how the levels of a multilingual state speak to one another.

What is this topic?

India's constitution devotes an entire Part to language; Article 343 makes Hindi in Devanagari script the official language of the Union, with a fifteen-year transition clause for English. Indonesia's constitution settles it in one sentence — the language of the state is Indonesian. Brazil's Article 13 does the same. China's constitution never uses the phrase "official language"; it puts the promotion of standard spoken Chinese in the last line of the article about education. Taiwan goes the other way: its National Languages Development Act declines to name a single national language and instead lists every indigenous community's language, plus Taiwan Sign Language, as national languages of equal standing. Japan has no statutory official language at all. Neither the US constitution nor any act of Congress names one — English was designated by executive order in March 2025.

Sources and dates

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