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Should a Country Speak a Single Language?
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What’s the maximum number of first-class-official languages that are usable for all official use and actually equal in stature?
So from the above, I’m guessing that after about two languages at most, the country partitions into language regions which develop their own cultures, and ultimately economies and political orders.
Your dataset is a bit biased towards countries of the Global North.
South Africa for example has 12 official languages.
Senegal has French as official language, but very few actually understand it.
The EU is not a country, but it has a parliament with most languages being live-translated.
Historically, that’s mostly because of colonial rule by the English government.
For decades (if not centuries) the Irish language was severely suppressed and might have even died out, if not for the continued efforts by the Irish people to preserve their language and cultural identity.
It’s only quite recently that Irish has become an official language in Ireland:
Of course, the fact that Ireland is trading a lot with the UK and other countries in the anglosphere and EU, is a reason to keep English as a major language.
German is also an official language in Belgium
I think that there's no hard limit. Each official language might add a bit of an additional cost to the government, but that cost is relatively small in comparison with the social and political benefits - including stability.
Eventually speakers of each language end clustered together, as you said near the end. But that's fine, too; a population (subjects of a country) doesn't need to coincide with a people (individuals sharing a common identity).