United Nations General Assembly Adopts Resolution On Multilingualism, Mentions Hindi Language For First Time

In a major development, the United Nations General Assembly on Friday (10 June) adopted an India-sponsored resolution on multilingualism that mentions the Hindi language for the first time.

The UN Resolution, co-facilitated by Andorra and Colombia, encourages the UN Department of Global Communications to continue disseminating important communications and messages in official as well as in non-official languages, including in Hindi language.

"This year, for the first time, the resolution has a mention of Hindi language...The resolution also mentions Bangla and Urdu for the first time. We welcome these additions," T S Tirumurti, Permanent Representative of India to the UN, said in a statement on Friday.

He said that multilingualism is recognised as a core value of the UN, and thanked Secretary-General for prioritising multilingualism.

As part of these efforts, ‘Hindi @ UN’ project was launched in 2018 with an objective to enhance the public outreach of the United Nations in Hindi language, and to spread greater awareness about global issues among millions of Hindi-speaking population around the world.

"In this context, I would like to recall UNSC resolution 13(1) adopted In its first session on 1 Feb. 1946, which stated that the United Nations cannot achieve its purposes unless the people of the world are fully informed of its aims and activities," he said.

Tirumurti said that it is imperative that multilingualism at the United Nations in a true sense is embraced and India will support the UN in achieving this objective.

It should be noted that Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish are the six official languages of the United Nations; English and French being the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat.