Language spoken by a large part of the population of a country, which may or may not be designated an official language (i.e. a language designated by law to be employed in the public domain).
UNESCO. Education for all: literacy for life; EFA global monitoring report, 2006. Paris: UNESCO, 2006.
In some situations where refugees expect a long wait before it is safe to return home, it may be possible to use a curriculum that ‘faces both ways’. Thus Afghan refugees in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s used a version of their home country curriculum but with the added subject of Urdu, the national language of Pakistan (Sinclair, 2002: 72).
Sinclair, Margaret. Planning education in and after emergencies. Fundamentals of Educational Planning 73. Paris: UNESCO-IIEP, 2002.