Ahead of US Presidential Polls of Novermber 3, a post has started making rounds on social media claiming that Telugu has been recognised as an official language in the United States.
“The Telugu Language Recognised as the official language for communication in the USA #telugulanguage #telugu #USA,” the post read.
Here’s the link to the above post.
More similar posts can be seen here and here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the post and found the claim to be misleading.
We ran a keyword search using ‘official language of United States’ and found an article by CNN dated 2018. According to the article, the US has no official language.
We also found an article by BBC dated 2018 on how the number of Telugu speakers has risen in the US over the last decade.
We also checked the official website of the United States government and found that even though more than 300 languages are spoken or signed by the population, yet there is no official language.
Further, we found that the confusion over languages arose after several media outlets published that Telugu has been recognised as the official language for communication in the USA. The articles can be seen here and here.
However, after reading the article, we found that by ‘official’ they meant that it is one of the languages the ballot papers for elections are printed in.
So, based on the above information, we ran another keyword search and found that to help voters of different lingual background, the ballot was is being made available in different languages.
The full detail about this can be read in the brief provided by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC).
Hence, from the above information, it is clear that the above post is misleading as Telugu has not been declared as an official language in the US but is one of the languages in which the ballot is being made available in certain states.
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