66 | Zimbabwe Rule of Law Journal Caportorti contends that these factors include the numerical importance of a linguistic community, their political and economic position within the state and the stage of development of a language.38 Vieytez summarises these social, historical and political considerations as a) the sociolinguistic situation of the country; b) the linguistic dynamics of the country and its context; c) the pre-existing legal situation and d) the political organisation of the state.39 The above analysis shows that whenever a state is considering affording official language status, it should take into account a) the number of people that speak the language, b) the level of development of the language, c) the extent of use of the language, d) the language’s history of discrimination, e) the functional load of the language in government business and f) the areas where the language is dominantly used. c. The levels of official language status International law does not clearly stipulate whether or not the granting of official language status to at least two languages in a state implies that the languages enjoy the same status. However, useful guidelines could be obtained from Vieytez’s study40 that came up with four levels of official languages status that he calls officialities. The first level is what he calls ‘full officiality and dominant language.’ In this case, official language status shows all the possible effects and the language involved is considered an element of the state’s linguistic identity. The official language is fully used in government business. Examples of full officiality and dominant language include French in France or Monaco, Swedish in Sweden or Russian in the Russian Federation. privileged linguistic instrument will be used in the various activities of the State... At the end of the colonial dependence... the people of many countries... faced the problem of having to decide which language would henceforth be the official language of their new State. During this process, what became the official language – either the single official or one of them – was often the language introduced by the colonizers; in a few cases, a national language was chosen.” 38 F Capotorti ‘Study on the rights of persons belonging to ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities’ (1979) UN Docs. E/ CN.4/Sub.2/384/Rev.1, Sales No E78XIV1 75-76. 39 EJR Vieytez ‘Official languages and minority languages: Issues about their legal status through comparative law’ (2004) II Mercator International Symposium: Europe: A new framework for all languages? 15. 40 EJR Vieytez (n 39 above) 24-25.