Trump plans executive order to make English the US’s official language

Donald Trump is planning to sign an executive order that would make English the official language of the US for the first time.

The order would also rescind a federal mandate issued by the former president Bill Clinton that agencies and other recipients of federal funding are required to provide language assistance to non-English speakers, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

The US has never had a national language at the federal level in its almost 250-year history. Given the nation’s long history of taking in immigrants from around the world, hundreds of languages are spoken in homes and businesses across the US and Spanish is especially prevalent.

The move is also just the latest in a series of symbolically nationalist executive orders, including one renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America in official government documents and reverting the name of Denali – North America’s highest mountain – to Mount McKinley, swapping a Native American name for that of a former US president.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, a White House summary of the order said the goal of making English the national language was to “promote unity, establish efficiency in the government and provide a pathway to civic engagement”. Agencies would still be allowed to provide documents and services in languages other than English under the order, according to the summary.

Trump has previously used anti-multilingual rhetoric as a talking point in his arguments against open borders and immigration in the US.

“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language,” Trump said during the Conservative Political Action Conference last year. “These are languages – it’s the craziest thing – they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing,” he added.

Despite Trump and Republicans spending millions of dollars on the 2024 campaign trail to reach Latin American and Spanish-speaking voters, the Trump administration took down the Spanish-language version of the White House website almost immediately after taking office.

Though the federal government has not recognized an official language up until this point, about 30 states have passed laws designating English as the official language. A few of these states, such as Mississippi and New Hampshire, require their public schools to teach only in English.