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Culture
Which languages keep the record
A public figure can be careful and still stop at the border of the language it was released in.
Global · 8 February 2026
An official document released by the state is only as public as the borders of its language. From school guidance to census notes, any record published in a language not spoken in a city's homes is formally public but practically closed. UNESCO highlights this gap by noting that a large share of learners are not taught in a language they understand well.source 1 Statistical databases suffer from the same bottleneck; for instance, while the UN Sustainable Development Goals database tries to keep indicators in more than one UN language, the depth of translation remains uneven.source 2 The true width of a public claim is measured by the number of languages in which it can be opened and read.
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