Gujarat High court, after listening to a petition that packaged commodities must contain details about goods in Hindi, has refused to do so. Chief Justice S J Mukhopadhaya, told that there is no National Language for the country, Hindi and English only being the official language and not the national language.
Our View: This question arises only in the case of multilingual nations like India. There is a difference between official language and national language.
1. An official language is a language that has been declared by a government to be the language of the governed nation.
2. A national language is a language that is spoken by the majority of the people within a nation.
Take the case of former USSR for instance. A good number of the republics that formed the USSR had their own national language. Russian was merely defined as the language of inter-ethnic communication, it assumed de facto the role of official language, for its role and influence in the USSR. After the disintegration of USSR the independent republics have adopted their own national languages as their official languages too.