In no time at all, speaking a language other than English in public is going to feel like an act of political defiance. On Friday morning, The Wall Street Journal first reported that the president would sign an executive order to make English the official language of the United States. The White House later confirmed the move, and as NBC News notes, “it’s the first time in history the country would have an official language.”
At first glance, Donald Trump’s move might seem like common sense.
At first glance, Donald Trump’s move might seem like common sense. The vast majority of Americans speak English: According to the most recent census data, 78.3% of the country speaks only English at home. That the U.S. is an English-dominant country cannot be disputed. But the order would bring with it more insidious consequences that demonstrate Trump and his allies mean to enforce a restrictive definition of what it means to be American.
Because this executive order isn’t just about acknowledging the dominance of English. It would also rescind the federal mandate that requires federal agencies and other recipients of federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English speakers. This mandate, originally issued by President Bill Clinton, ensured that millions of Americans could access government services, regardless of their primary language. CBS News reports that agencies will still be able to provide documents and services in other languages, but this order strips away the requirement to do so. In effect, it gives permission to shut out non-English speakers from services their tax dollars pay for.
Stripping this access will make life significantly harder for millions — according to 2019 census data, approximately 8% of the country speaks English less than “very well” — leaving them without guaranteed access to critical information and support. Without required language access, navigating essential services will become more difficult.
Still more troubling, Trump’s proposed executive order is not merely about language policy. It is also the latest move in a long American tradition of leveraging English proficiency to judge who “belongs” and who does not.
Throughout our history, the effort to define this country as monolingually English has coincided with efforts to exclude certain groups from full participation in society. Indigenous children were forced into boarding schools where they were punished for speaking their own languages. Spanish was banned from classrooms in the Southwest to force assimilation. During World War I, laws were passed to ban German in schools. The push for English-only policies has never been about communication; it has always been about control, about who gets to be seen as fully American and who does not.
That sentiment was evident on Friday when ProEnglish — which bills itself as “the nation’s leading advocate of official English” but has ties to the modern anti-immigrant movement — quickly praised Trump’s plan.
“The president properly responded to the disconnect that undermined America’s traditional process of immigrant assimilation. Every American should be proud of their national origin, race, native language, and customs. But without public policies that reinforce the English tie that unites us, multilingual diversity could well become the undoing of our country,” said acting ProEnglish Executive Director Stephanie White.
Rhetoric that frames non-English speakers (or even bilingual and trilingual Americans) as unpatriotic infiltrators might appeal to xenophobic Americans, but it has no basis in reality. Immigrants and their children overwhelmingly learn English. One Cato Institute report from 2019 estimates that “about 91 percent of immigrants in the United States between 1980 and 2010 reportedly spoke English compared with 86 percent who lived here from 1900 to 1930. While immigrants with different backgrounds are more or less likely to learn English than others, our analysis unambiguously shows that today’s immigrants are more likely to learn English than immigrants in the beginning of the last century.”
Rhetoric that frames non-English speakers (or even bilingual and trilingual Americans) as unpatriotic infiltrators has no basis in reality.
Yet English-only advocates continue to promote the false idea that linguistic diversity threatens national identity. They ignore the fact that the U.S. has always been multilingual; that by the 16th century, Spanish was spoken in much of the Southwest, years before English arrived; and that Indigenous languages existed here for centuries before colonization.
In addition, the U.S. is the fourth-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, according to the Cervantes Institute, and home to more than 350 languages, according to the Census Bureau. The suggestion that the only authentic way to be American is to speak English, exclusively, ignores both history and modern reality: that America has always been polyglot.
“America has never had an official language — because we don’t need one,” the Congressional Hispanic Caucus posted Friday afternoon on X. “Trump’s plan to make English official is a direct attack on our diversity and history. Millions of Americans speak other languages, and that doesn’t make them any less American.”
Trump’s executive order would do nothing to improve government efficiency or to help Americans. It does not even have material benefits to those who speak only English. Rather, it strips away language access protections and sends a clear message: If you don’t speak English, you don’t belong. The move is yet more extremist, political bullying that divides us further.
Trump can make English the official language, but language has always been fluid and evolving, shaped by the people who speak it. And in classrooms, communities and political spaces, non-English speakers have long been active participants in shaping this country. This proposed executive order cannot change that.
