Which of the following languages is not one of the 6 official languages of the United Nations?

There are six official languages of the UN. These are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

With the exception of Arabic and Spanish, the official languages are those of the permanent members of the Security Council who hold veto power (the U.S., Britain, China, Russia and France) - the most politically influential and powerful nations in period following WW2. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world by native speakers. Arabic became an official language as a consequence of the Arabic-speaking members of the UN agreeing to pay the costs of introducing the language for three years.

Initially only English and French were the working languages of both the General Assembly and the Security Council. Working languages are the languages of “day-to-day professional exchanges” while the official languages are the languages in which all official documents must be written. Russian and Chinese achieved the status of working languages in the 60's and 70's respectively.

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8 Comments

Denise Currie

The six languages recognised by the UN are: Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, French and Russian. So there are once again two correct answers in there, German and Chinese, neither of these are official languages of the UN. So my answer of Chinese is actually correct and I was marked wrong. Disliked and reported

Sybilla

As with all things in language, there is a constant evolution in denominations. Nowadays, the official language is called Chinese, even though there are seven languages from the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in China: Mandarin (Northern Chinese), Wu (Shanghainese), Yue (Cantonese), Xiang (Huan), Min (Taiwanese), Gan (Kan) and Hakka (13 different dialects).

Julie Allen

The UN also stated that Mandarin, not Cantonese, is one of its six official languages.

Kittymewslie

Chinese is not a language.

William Laughlin

sftcw, There is only a language called "Chinese" in the minds of non-chinese people. What you call dialects are really separate languages. The spoken varieties of Chinese are mutually unintelligible to their respective speakers. They differ from each other to about the same extent as the modern Romance languages. Most of the differences among them occur in pronunciation and vocabulary. Mandarin, Cantonese, etc are considered different languages by scholars.