Why Making English the Official US Language Could Change America Forever

How the new presidential action undermines the heritage of multilingual American speakers

This article originally appeared here on Medium.

If there’s one thing I admire about the United States, it’s the country’s linguistic diversity.

America is a new Babel. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans speak at least 350 languages at home, but the numbers could be even higher if we trust the data originating from non-official sources.

The United States has never had an official language at the federal level. But now, for the first time in American history, a U.S. President signed an executive order anointing English as the country’s official language.

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I have campaigned for linguistic diversity in my country since the time I was in high school. Now, thirty years later, as a linguist and language teacher, I firmly believe linguistic diversity must be preserved at all costs. A significant part of a country’s rich cultural heritage is found in the ancestral languages of its original inhabitants.

For me, and please correct me if I’m wrong, this executive order isn’t something to be taken lightly as it marks a significant change in federal language policy.

This presidential action goes against the country’s multicultural heritage and raises questions about the linguistic rights of millions of citizens who speak other languages in the United States.

English is the U.S. de facto language, but this “official” designation comes with both linguistic and non-linguistic implications.

America always stood proud of its linguistic diversity, and who can deny the country has a rich background regarding languages?

In Linguistic diversity and the first settlement of the New World, American linguist, Johanna Nichols reminds us how “the Americas harbor a very great diversity of indigenous language stocks, many more than are found in any other continent.

On top of that original “linguistic stock,” in the aftermath of the Age of Discoveries, America would become a linguistic melting pot. The country’s first European settlers were migrants themselves. Many of them spoke English, but many others didn’t. Together, they created a new Babel, and they all had one thing in common. They were all strangers in a land that was not their own.

Many studies highlight the “linguistic cauldron,” which is the essence of America as we know it. In Immigration and Language Diversity in the United States, the authors corroborate everything I’ve mentioned.

Contrary to what some Americans seem to believe, the United States historically has been a polyglot nation containing a diverse array of languages. At the time of independence, non-English European immigrants made up one quarter of the population and in Pennsylvania two-fifths of the population spoke German. In addition, an unknown but presumably significant share of the new nation’s inhabitants spoke an American Indian or African language, suggesting that perhaps a third or more of all Americans spoke a language other than English.

The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the size of the country. Following several treaties with Spain and Britain, by 1850 there were “tens of thousands of French and Spanish speakers along with many more slaves and the diverse indigenous peoples of those vast territories were added to the linguistic mix. Alaska and Hawaii would follow before the end of the 19th century.”

In the early twentieth century, a decline in the immigration wave naturally caused the linguistic diversity curve to wilt.

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This isn’t the first time in American history we have seen a restrictive U.S. immigration policy, after the First World War, the global depression changed the status quo, and the migration routes shifted.

The number of foreign-born residents went from 14.7% (1910) to 4.7% by 1970. However, a new migrant influx has seen multilingualism rise in the United States. A fifth of the population (67.3 million people) now speaks a non-English language in the household.

The new presidential action may seem like a political decision, but its root causes run deeper, and they seem to align with what some linguists refer to as the American Paradox of Linguistic Hegemony.

In short, the paradoxical nature lies in a nation historically diverse, and escalating artificially toward monolingual English by imposing an artificial backstop to natural linguistic rip curls common to every population.

I don’t see why someone would want to privilege a monolingual country by imposing an English-only rule either as yet another forceful way toward an ethnically monolithic America.

Linguist Calvin Veltman has long warned us how without immigration, all non-English languages would in time vanish in a predominantly “English-only” ecosystem.

Looking at the latest executive decisions emanating from the White House, I think we can safely say we are now at the brink of what could be a linguistic cleansing of an unprecedented scale in the United States.

Currently, more than 78% of the population speaks only English at home, but millions of citizens use other languages.

English is the country’s prevalent language, and more than 30 states have in the past passed legislation designating English as the official language at the state level.

However, at the federal level, a similar standard has never been adopted until now. The new presidential decree changed this by establishing English as the official language of the United States.

Beyond the socio-cultural impact, I can also see the financial aspects behind this decision.

The civil rights movement in the 1960s brought forward several laws to guarantee services and equal opportunities for non-English speakers. But for the last decades, lawmakers have repeatedly tried to pass legislation to make English the official language of the country, to no avail until now.

Vice President, JD Vance, has long defended this policy. When he was an Ohio state senator, Vance introduced the English Language Unity Act, a bill that sought to compel the federal government to conduct all its official business in English and introduce a language testing standard as a requirement for citizenship. And we all know how fluency in English is a fundamental requirement for American citizenship.

It seems the new executive is trying to cut expenses indiscriminately, but the ultimate purpose of this measure extends way beyond the financial scope.

The new decree will mark the end of mandatory federal language assistance as established by former President Bill Clinton. No more federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English-speaking citizens seems like yet another way to push back against immigration under the cloak of efficiency and nationalistic fervor appealing to the values of “identity,” and “unity.”

From my perspective as a linguist with years of research in multiculturalism, I view this as an attempt to impose a monolithic vision of America by restricting access to essential services, which poses a significant barrier to the integration of new immigrant communities.

The twentieth century had many of these nationalistic movements imposing linguistic purity as part of the acculturation efforts to eliminate foreign influence as part of a broader obsession with racial purity. So this isn’t something we haven’t seen before, and we all know all too well how the story ends.

References

• Nichols, J. (1990). Linguistic Diversity and the First Settlement of the New World. Language, 66(3), 475–521. https://doi.org/10.2307/414609

• Rumbaut, R. G., & Massey, D. S. (2013). Immigration and Language Diversity in the United States. Daedalus, 142(3), 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_00224

• Veltman, C. (1983). Language Shift in the United States. New York: Walter De Gruyter.

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Rui Alves is a language teacher, published author, international book judge, and publisher. He runs Alchemy Publications and serves as editor-in-chief for Engage on Substack, Life Unscripted, Musicverse, Writelicious, The Academic, Portugal Calling, Engage on Medium, Rock n’ Heavy, Beloved, Zenite, Poetaph, and Babel.