As America narrows its linguistic identity by executive order, the fight over who gets to be heard —and in what language—returns with new urgency
In 1780, one of America’s founding fathers, John Adams, was frustrated. Across the pond, there were the great European language academies—the Académie française in Paris, or the Accademia della Crusca in Florence—dedicated to maintaining the purity of their nations’ respective languages (Translator’s review of the Académie française’s latest attempt to capture the shape-shifting French language is reviewed on page 43).
But in England, there had been nothing official: no public institution, no single dictionary, no formal, state-mandated grammar. This was likely distressing for someone who believed English had a natural precision to it that made it ideal for law-making. In a letter to the President of the Continental Congress, Adams pitched an idea: “the Honour of forming the first public Institution for refining, correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language”. Not in England, but in America.
It was an early outburst of linguistic nationalism in the nascent United States. But, even then, it took place in a country where English was dominant, but not alone. Less than a decade later, when the US constitution was published, it was printed in German and Dutch translation to make sure it was widely understood. Congress ignored John Adams’ idea. And for a century and more, no one seemed especially fussed that the US had no official language, or a language academy in the grand European style. Then things started to change.
“There has been long-
standing language discrimination against different groups,” Fran Fajana, Director of Racial Justice Strategy at the civil rights organisation LatinoJustice, told me over a video call from New York. She recalled the anti-German language movement, a since forgotten moment in American history during the First World War when states tried to squeeze German out of public life. In Iowa, the so-called Babel Proclamation—harkening to the mythic biblical tower in which humanity is cursed by God to division between uncommon languages—forbade the use of any language in public besides English for about six months in 1918 until it was repealed, all in an attempt to target the state’s German immigrant community.
Some cases ended up in the courts. In 1923, Meyer v. Nebraska went all the way to the US Supreme Court, resulting in the court striking down a state law that banned the teaching of any modern language other than English before the 8th grade. “The Supreme Court essentially said, no, you cannot discriminate against this group of folks because there was some anti-German fever at the time,” Fajana said.
She listed several other more recent cases: a landmark 1970s Supreme Court ruling forcing schools to better support the bilingualism of Chinese-American students who found it hard to understand English-only school programmes, and LatinoJustice’s own origin story, filing cases to defend the rights of Puerto Ricans to access schooling, and voting ballots, in Spanish. “We have had a long history of worrying about, caring about, or litigating on behalf of English language learners,” Fajana told me.
Now, they are worried again. Of the 143 executive orders President Trump steamed through during the first one hundred days of his presidency—beating FDR’s 99—a flurry have either indirectly challenged the multilingual status quo of the United States, or targeted it more directly.
On March 1st, Trump declared that he was designating “one—and only one—official language”, which would be English, to “promote unity” and “cultivate a shared American culture for all citizens”. The order revoked a previous one made by Bill Clinton which had compelled federal agencies to assess how well they serve those with limited English proficiency.
Several of the founding fathers of the American republic—including Thomas Jefferson—prided themselves on their multilingualism. Not so Trump. In the first days of his presidency, the Spanish language pages of the White House website abruptly disappeared. On the campaign trail, Trump’s anti-immigration shtick regularly took a nativist linguistic turn. At one rally, he complained immigrants to the United States were speaking languages “that nobody in this country has ever heard of”.
On one level, Trump’s executive order on English as the country’s official language is a performative climax for the English Only movement which has been pumping away with renewed vigour since the 1980s—the same decade President Reagan declared “it is absolutely wrong and against American concepts to have a bilingual education program” that preserves someone’s native language without getting them “adequate in English”. Proposals to make English the country’s official language at the federal level have been regularly made in Congress in recent decades, always by Republicans and most recently in 2023 when JD Vance, then the junior Senator from Ohio, introduced a bill entitled the ‘English Language Unity Act’. Some states already have laws that make English the language of their state, occasionally alongside others (Hawaiian in Hawaii, and more than 20 indigenous languages in Alaska).
Nonetheless, people are fearful of the possible consequences of Trump’s order which go far beyond its symbolism. Ben Karl, chair of the American Translators’ Association (ATA), told me he remembers their last board meeting two days before the 2024 election. “In my board report I said we’re looking very closely at the incoming administration, as we look at every administration.” They decided it was a ‘wait and see’ situation. “I think we were kind of expecting things like this to happen, given the tenor and bent of this administration. But it was no less a slap in the face.”
In a joint statement with other organisations in the language services sector published shortly after the executive order was issued, they pointed out that they expect practical repercussions to span the healthcare, justice and education systems, where Limited English Proficiency (LEP) individuals may lose access to translation and interpreting services that previously would have been safeguarded. Plainly, this is everything from understanding what the police or a judge might be saying to you, to knowing what you’re ticking at the ballot box, what the consent form a teacher has given you for your child says, or news a doctor is breaking about your sick parent.
One of Karl’s colleagues, Giovanna Carriero-Contreras, Chair Elect of the American Association of Interpreters and Translators in Education (AAITE), told me that it’s hard to stay on top of all the executive orders “popping up like mushrooms” from the administration. ‘Flooding the zone’ with orders and actions and media stunts is a declared strategy of Trump’s to overwhelm and demoralise the regime’s opponents.
But Giovanna’s team still needs to offer practical advice on how to respond. And while Trump’s actions don’t change the fact that the number of people speaking languages other than English in the US has tripled since 1980, they do create a renewed sense of jeopardy around linguistic rights. “What is really taken away from us is any understanding of how the government is going to protect those whose rights have been violated. There is no recourse at the moment that is clear to anybody because all the guidance that created the framework has been wiped off.”
These are the opening shots in what is likely to be a protracted, multi-pronged war against multilingualism and language learning in general, even when it’s English. Another order eviscerating the Department of Education has already led to the dismantlement of the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), tasked with helping immigrants and others become more proficient in English. Fran Fajana, a close follower of the situation, notes how the office’s staff has been cut from 16 to one person responsible for managing one hundred and five grantees, now left to wonder about the future of the programmes they run in schools and adult education.
Meanwhile, yet another executive order “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs” has meant that an Indigenous American organisation the ATA work with has lost 90% of their funding overnight. Following European colonialism and its associated linguicide, not a single Indigenous American language makes even the top 20 most spoken languages in the US today. Organisations such as this one provide clubs and activities that offer communities some of the only third places where vulnerable or reclaimed languages are used.
68
Number of Americans who speak a language other than English at home, itself a fraction of those proficient in more than one languageWidespread bilingualism, whereby American citizens are empowered to be both excellent English speakers while maintaining their heritage language, is not an aspiration of the Trump administration, despite the possible economic upsides for millions of Americans and the country at large. They want something different: assimilation into a once-dominant, now teetering, hegemonic English-speaking culture. As Vance put it recently “fundamentally, America is an Anglo country.”
An Anglo country, in a world where English is also becoming increasingly dominant. Recent shifts in American policy will echo around the globe. One example: the linguist Gregory Anderson, founder of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, told me how a recent grant to his organisation was terminated because it came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, gutted by Trump. The Institute has helped document languages and support linguistic communities across Africa, Asia and South America, regions that commonly don’t have their own local or national bodies funding this kind of work. Something tells me it won’t bother Trump that some of these communities might lose their languages as a result. If he doesn’t care about Americans losing their languages, he’s unlikely to care about non-Americans losing them.
Linguists and their defenders are contemplating not only how to cope with the onslaught, but how to fight back. “We’re exploring all legal options,” Fajana said. “There is absolutely no reason for the United States to make English the official language. It is already the language of commerce. And it’s not that immigrants who come to the United States don’t want to learn English. But what is wrong with being multilingual? That’s my basic response.”
It is possible that the obliteration of the OELA and Trump’s executive orders might, as the Supreme Court has found many times before, ultimately fall foul of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. While the Act doesn’t specifically name ‘language’ outright, it requires that no one face exclusion from federal programs or activities on the grounds of “race, color, or national origin”. Plaintiffs have won cases defending language access in the past by arguing that ‘national origin’ is tightly bound up with a person’s language.
In healthcare, Jaime Russell, a certified healthcare interpreter and ATA board director, believes her sector is comparatively immune to assaults on language rights. For a start, the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals around the world including the US, runs surprise inspection visits to ensure hospitals offer language access for patients who might otherwise struggle to make themselves understood. “It’s a glimmer of hope,” Russell said: “Hospital policies don’t get changed very fast. If it takes four, five years and then flips back —we’re good.”
Then there’s economic self-interest. Hospitals are penalised by Medicaid and Medicare if their readmission rates go above a certain percentage. “The better communication a doctor has with their patients, the better the outcome”, Russell says. It’s in their best interest to keep people out of the hospital because they will get more funding that way. It’s true—a 2004 study found that LEP patients had a 6% longer overall hospital stay compared to their English-proficient counterparts; a damning indictment not of multilingualism but a systemic failure to cater for it. For a DOGE-loving administration that obsesses over eliminating ‘inefficiencies’, they might want to recheck their maths on language access and provision in the US. Language acquisition takes decades. It’ll take even longer given Trump’s gutting of the OELA, and US taxpayers already working hard to improve their English need healthcare access now.
30
Number of US states where English is the official languageAs any multilingual person knows—but as Trump seems to want to stubbornly ignore—speaking another language often helps us feel closer to others. John Adams understood this: he learned Latin and Ancient Greek as a young man, and then French when he was posted to Paris on sensitive diplomatic business during the war of independence. Trump has also probably not thought about how his language policies look in the places he’d like to absorb, however fantastically, into the United States. It is hard to imagine Quebeckers signing up for an English-only US. Greenlanders speak Greenlandic and Danish, not English. Spanish is the most widely spoken language in Puerto Rico, a US territory where some politicians are flirting with the idea of US statehood.
As for the English language itself, Trump’s policies offer no grand vision for its study or advancement. He has no interest in funding the kind of humanities research which pushes forward its scientific or literary traditions. He has no interest in a language academy at home, nor bold aims for nurturing abroad the global lingua franca that US power and prosperity has catalysed, almost accidentally, over the last century.
His own father, born to German migrants, grew up in the very years the German language was being stigmatised in American public life. Language discrimination is likely as much a part of his family’s personal story as English. Yet he appears to prize one of these realities far higher than the other.
80
Percentage of Vietnamese speakers who are US citizens; higher than the equivalent figure for speakers of the other largest language groups in the US: Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog and ArabicInstead, a man who struggles to understand an Afghan accent, demands a pale facsimile of unity and American exceptionalism in the only way, and language, he knows how.
