English Language Day 2025: The day coincides with both the birthday and death day of William Shakespeare and World Book Day. The English language is one of the most popular languages used across the world. The day presents the development, history, culture, and achievements associated with the language.
English Language Day: History
English is the most widely spoken language or a "world language". Therefore, it is known as the lingua franca of the modern era. Along with French, English is also the working language of the United Nations (UN). English Language Day is the result of a 2010 initiative by the Department of Global Communications. It established language days for each of the Organisation’s six official languages.
Under the initiative, the duty stations of the UN celebrate six separate days, and each day is dedicated to one of the Organisation's six official languages across the world.
The language days are as follows:
- Arabic (18 December)
- Chinese (20 April)
- English (23 April)
- French (20 March)
- Russian (6 June)
- Spanish (23 April)
English Language Day: Purpose behind the celebration
Basically, the main purpose of the UN's language days is to observe multilingualism and cultural diversity. The days also promote the equal use of all six official languages throughout the Organisation.
At the UN, the Language days aims to entertain and to inform about the goal of raising awareness and respect for the history, culture, and achievements of each of the six working languages among the UN community.
On this day several events are organised, including book-reading events, English quizzes, poetry and literature exchanges, and other activities that stimulate the English language.
The celebrations of the day for 2021 focus on Africa. English is spoken in about two dozen African countries as an official language or widely used in education, administration, law, business, the mass media, and literature, the top five (by the number of inhabitants) gathering nearly 500 million people. English is also one of the official languages of the African Union and of various Africa's subregional organisations.
UN and Multilingualism
Multilingualism is an essential factor in harmonious communication among peoples. By promoting tolerance, it ensures effective and increased participation in all the Organisation's work, as well as greater effectiveness and involvement with better outcomes.
As discussed above, the six official languages of the United Nations are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. The working languages of the United Nations Secretariat are English and French. It is used in day-to-day professional exchanges.
Let us tell you that the United Nations Secretary-General on 3 September 2019 appointed Mr Movses Abelian of Armenia (as well as a national of Georgia), Under-Secretary-General for General Assembly and Conference management, as Coordinator for Multilingualism.
The General Assembly resolution 69/250 was implemented for it. He is responsible for coordinating the overall implementation of multilingualism Secretariat-wide.
Gender-Inclusive language
The main aim is to help the staff of the United Nations so that they can communicate in a gender-inclusive way in the six official languages of the Organisation.
A gender-inclusive language here means that there should not be discrimination against a particular sex or social gender regarding speaking and writing.
The key role of language in shaping cultural and social attitudes is using gender-inclusive language as a powerful way to boost gender equality and eradicate gender bias. It also does not perpetuate gender stereotypes.
Therefore, English Language Day is observed on 23 April to generate awareness regarding the importance of language.
About William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was a writer who lived in England a long, long time ago. People often called him the "Bard of Avon" because he came from a town called Stratford-upon-Avon.
He's known as one of the best writers ever in the English language, especially for his plays. He wrote about 39 plays, which are stories meant to be acted out. He also wrote 154 shorter poems called sonnets, three long story-poems, and some other bits of poetry. That's a lot of writing!
Many of his plays were sad stories, called tragedies, and some people think they were inspired by sad things that happened in his own life.
When he was young, he grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon. He got married to Anne Hathaway when he was only 18, and they had three kids: Susanna and twins named Hamnet and Judith.
Around the time he was 21 to 28 years old (between 1585 and 1592), he moved to London and did really well as an actor, a writer of plays, and part-owner of a theatre group called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which later became the King's Men. It seems he went back to his hometown of Stratford when he was about 49 (around 1613) and died there three years later.
Shakespeare's writing had a huge and lasting impact on how plays are written and on all kinds of literature. He made characters more interesting and stories more complex and used language and different styles of writing in new ways.
Even now, almost 400 years after he died, Shakespeare is still the best-selling playwright in the world! They say over four billion copies of his plays and poems have been sold. Plus, he's the third most translated writer ever, meaning his work has been turned into more languages than almost anyone else's.
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