What happened to the Ethnologue's identification of "national" and "official" languages?


In the 17th edition, the Ethnologue has deliberately moved away from the official/national distinction in the description of language status, on the grounds that such distinctions are often inconsistently applied from country to country and thus lead to considerable confusion. The categorizations that we now use focus on two facets of language status: the "health" of the language as more fully described by the EGIDS scale, and the function or functions of the language within that country.

For a more complete discussion of how we categorize Language Status, please see this page: http://www.ethnologue.com/about/language-status.