English

Where the record and the law disagree

The list follows each country's record, and for English the record and the statute book part ways in several places. The United Kingdom has no official language; English is co-official with Welsh in Wales and with Irish in Northern Ireland, and neither England nor Scotland has one. Australia has no official language at federal or state level. Both are on the list because English is dominant there for historical reasons. The United States is absent from the record, although Executive Order 14224 designated English its official language in 2025, and 32 states and all 5 territories give it official or co-official status.

Elsewhere the status is shared. English and French are official at federal level in Canada, where Quebec's only official language is French. In Ireland English is the second official language, after Irish, and in New Zealand it shares official status with Māori and New Zealand Sign Language.

Why new states kept English

The British Empire carried English to North America, Africa, Oceania and elsewhere. At independence, some states with many indigenous languages kept English as the official language to avoid raising any one of their own above the others. English is one of the official languages of India, and many Indians have shifted from linking it with colonialism to linking it with economic progress.

Who sets the standard

Nobody does. English is pluricentric: no single national authority sets the standard, spoken norms are set by custom, and standard written English is kept by the consensus of educated users with no government or international body overseeing it. Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755 introduced standard spellings, and Noah Webster's American Dictionary of 1828 set an American norm apart from the British one.

How the spelling became so irregular

English has been written in the Latin alphabet since the 9th century; runes served only for short inscriptions in Old English. The spelling layers French, Latin and Greek conventions over a Germanic base, and sound changes such as the Great Vowel Shift left it behind. Consonant spellings are fairly regular. Vowels are not, because there are many more vowel sounds than vowel letters, and children can take longer to read English fluently than Italian, Spanish or German.

What Old Norse and French added

Late Old English borrowed some grammar and core vocabulary from Old Norse. Middle English, spoken under Norman rule, borrowed heavily from French dialects and from Latin, which is why its everyday words, grammar and sound system stay Germanic while much of its vocabulary does not.