Nobody ever said the law needs to be practical.
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Very weird wording if you ask me. The term “official” basically means “de jure”. How can a language be a de facto de jure language? Either it is official or it is not official.
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It’s not de jure, but it’s the language all the jure is written in. So you might as well reconsider your definition and usefulness of “official language” if you don’t include it.
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I felt an urge to reply with
Note the “Official”. You should look into that.
but that would be inappropriately cheeky 
Anyway, it definitely is confusing, at least for me.
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It’s not like I don’t understand what they are trying to say. It just seems contradictory to me. Since trohde seems to feel the same way about this it might be a German thing.
It’s definitely good if a definition is also useful but “usefulness” is not a criteria for something being a “definition”. The term “official” to me has always meant “legally/formally declared”. The german dictionary “Duden” also agrees with that.
If in English the term “official” does not mean “legally/formally declared” then what does it mean? I checked Merriam-Webster and it says it means “authorized”. Authorized then again according to Merriam-Webster means “endowed with authority”. “Authority” then according to Merriam-Webster means “power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior”.
So according to the biggest American dictionary “official” means “endowed with the power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior”. Like what? 
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Anglo MO:
Colonize a country
Genocide its population to provide Lebensraum for Anglos
Plunder said country for what it’s worth
Ban everybody else from doing this very same thing
Blame “the British” and play the moral high ground
Give what’s left of the native population participation trophies, e.g., “official language”, “cultural recognition”, etc. as “reparation”
???
Profit.
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In virtually any Go tournament, the ‘majority’ of players are right-handed but the left-handed players are still considered ‘officially’ entered, heck they may even play well. When was the last time you were playing Go and wondered “Is my opponent left-handed?”.
One thing I like about Go is that although the commentary and lessons can be in many languages, the game itself needs no translation - it is a language.
Nailed it.
Literally.
No, it sounds like doublespeak, especially if in fact
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It is very different. If only because the EU is merely an international treaty (albeit a very unique one) that any member may leave, as the UK did, while Scotland, for instance, has no authority to leave the UK.
I share the opinion that a language cannot, by definition, be “de facto” official. The fact that legislation is written in a given language does not make it an official language.
Which is fine, you don’t necessarily need an official language as a country. For instance the US never used to have an official language and that didn’t prevent any legislation from being written; but for some reason in 2025 Trump decided to make English the official language of the USA, so now it is official.
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Of course it does.
Cf. Ireland.
Is this supposed to be a dark joke?
Scotland does have moral and legal authority to leave the UK. This is a dominant political position in Scotland.
It is true that there might be legal challenges from London.
Ireland already succeeded in leaving the UK despite objections (and disputed territory).
Ok, I thought my comment was clear but if you were not joking:
- Any part of any country could in theory reach independance by force. Examples like Ireland are meaningless in this discussion.
- Any EU member state may unilaterally withdraw from the EU. Constituents of the UK may not unilaterally withdraw from the UK, as powers over the union are only vested in the UK Parliament itself. Whether Scotland would be willing and/or capable to achieve independance by force is entirely irrelevant to this distinction and goes back to the first point.
I would hope the fundamental differences between an union like the EU and a sovereign state like the UK are anyway sufficiently obvious that they need no further debate.
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I know that Trump would like to make it the official language, and he may have issued an executive order requiring the executive branch to treat it as such, but that wouldn’t make it the official language, which would require an act of Congress. In the early or mid-1970s, Sen. Sam Hayakawa, famous for his great book on semantics (Language in Action, 1939), did introduce a bill to make English the official language of the U.S., but it was defeated.
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Wait wait wait. This is interesting although this thread is getting more and more off topic. But I wanted to double check if the law in NZ is actually written in the specified official languages.
So I searched for the NZ law books. Only to find… none?! Are there actually countries that don’t have laws specified in law books? How does that even work? I’m so confused. I mean not designating your actual official language as an actual official language is one thing, but not having laws at all is a whole other level of WTF to me.
I just read into this as well. This seems to be the correct assessment. An EO only applies to the executive branch and not to the other branches of government.
I guess we could say that English is the official language of the executive branch of the US government. But it is not in fact the official language of the whole nation.
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That’s something different as the official language question.
Sometimes in the history of the world some countries were ruled without any kind of written law. (Which is different as any kind of laws.)
Famous example is China which until a few decades ago didn’t use written laws in books.
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Thanks for mentioning S. I. Hayakawa – his book that you also mention, in the enlargened edition from 1949 renamed to Language in Thought and Action, was standard reading when I studied linguistics, I still must have the German edition (“Semantik – Sprache im Denken und Handeln”) somewhere in the attic.
I wonder whether he played Go …
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which, if I’m not mistaken, is the first time that has ever happened on any forum ever.
Of course, people realize this was a flimsily-veiled ruse to shamelessly plug my tiny blog. In brief, I see no reason why Māori couldn’t excel at Go. I have yet to hand out any cards though; I’m still debating with myself whether they’d be happier if they never knew the game existed. ← dramatic much? 
It appears to me there are laws, written in English, via this official website maintained by the Parliamentary Counsel Office:
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2026/9/en/latest/#LMS1442023
(To state the obvious, this fact is not surprising, since one would think it would be quite a task to convert the vocabulary of a millennium of legal activity into an “endangered” indigenous language spoken fluently by 4% of the population.)
The problem here is that the issue seems obvious but is not. In a way we have come full circle to the language requiring an army and a navy.
In the United States this very question was debated and considered for decades, in all the states, until the answer was ultimately given from the barrel of a gun.
I would love to write you a book in reply but we may have to wait a little while on that. Let me for now leave you with the definition of sovereignty which I just found in Webster’s 1828 dictionary:
SOVEREIGNTY, n. suv’eranty. Supreme power; supremacy; the possession of the highest power, or of uncontrollable power. Absolute sovereignty belongs to God only.
Regarding the original question of if English is on official language of NZ
So we have now established that the definition that Uberdude used, the one you also referenced, is not actually the definition Wikipedia used. Because Maori is in fact not the language the law is written in.
So the question why the Wikipedia editor considers English to be an official language of NZ remains as well as the question of what the definition of an official language according to Wikipedia or the English language is.
Regarding the “laws” of NZ
What you linked is not a law book. That is merely a piece of legislation/law. But where is the codified law structure that this is integrated in?
No we haven’t. Armies and languages have nothing to do with each other and even the Wikipedia entry about that quote directs the reader to “a more scholary approach” somewhere else.
If they had something to do with each other then the US, the country with the strongest contemporary army, surely would have its own language but it doesn’t.