Bangladesh urges German and Japanese as official UN languages

Oct 6, 2009, 18:38 GMT

Dhaka - A senior Bangladeshi minister Tuesday proposed that German and Japanese should be included - in addition to Bangla - in the United Nations' official languages list.

'In addition to Bangla, the German and Japanese languages should be recognised as official languages of the United Nations,' said Bangladesh's Local Government Minister Syed Ashraful Islam, who is also the General Secretary of the ruling Awami League party.

He made this remarks as Bangladesh's parliament adopted a special thanks motion to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed's for her initiative to recognise Bangla as one of the official languages of the world body.

Hasina in her September 26 address at the United Nations General Assembly requested the world leaders that Bangla should be one of the official languages of the UN.

Ashraful said over 250 million people now speak Bangla, for which young Bangladeshis laid down their lives while the then Pakistani government sought to impose Urdu as the only state language of undivided Pakistan during the early 1950s.

As a mark of respect to Bangladeshi language martyrs, UNESCO observes International Mother Language Day on February 21, the day in 1952 a number of Bangladeshi students were killed in police firing while protesting the Pakistani decision.

It was inconsideration of this, the minister said, that Bangla should be made an official UN language - not because so many people speak it.

He said German and Japanese had not been made official languages because Germany and Japan were defeated in the World War II - but now, 'since the scenario of the Second World War is no more, these two languages should be made official languages,' he said.

The UN uses six official languages in its intergovernmental meetings and documents - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. The Secretariat uses two working languages, English and French.