Yesterday, Trump signed an executive order making English the sole official language of the United States, a target of lobbying efforts on the part of anti-immigration organizations for decades. It is a retrograde act that does nothing to promote communication but rather only seeks to muzzle it, by revoking the 25 year old Executive Order 13166, “Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency.”
There are, according to the Ethnologue’s count, 197 living languages indigenous to the United States, almost all of them endangered, and nearly 800 languages all together in New York City. Not one of these has ever been considered for official status on the national level and only a handful have any official status on the state level (in Hawai’i and Alaska). So when the new order speaks of promoting “unity”, cultivating “a shared American culture for all citizens” and creating “a pathway to civic engagement” through the sole use of a Germanic language originating on the other side of the world, it merely continues centuries of exclusion, erasure and the flattening of diversity. And yet, despite the United States’ rocky relationship with diversity, no administration felt obliged to impose an official language for 250 years. Why now?
Far from promoting unity or “a citizenry that can freely exchange ideas” (one of the first things this administration has cracked down on), this order, like so many other actions over the last month, is a brazen assertion of Anglo supremacy as the defining feature of the country. (As Trump said himself: “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”) It is of a piece with closing off migration and asylum from non-Western countries while courting the immigration of South African whites.
Some have declared that yesterday’s order is largely symbolic, in that it only frees government agencies from producing materials in languages other than English while not rescinding any non-English materials. But when these agencies are driven by the same racial animus that gave us the original order, the removal of non-English materials is surely on the horizon. After all, even the Spanish language version of the White House website was taken down mere hours after the inauguration. And when this order eventually works its way to the Census or even the Voting Rights Act, we may see deep damage that could shape the electoral landscape for years to come, another one of the current president’s long held fantasies.
At ELA, with your participation and help, we will continue to promote, document and do what we can to protect the hundreds of languages in our midst. We hope you will stand with us in confronting discrimination and exclusion in all forms wherever we find it.
(Last year, ELA co-director Ross Perlin presciently wrote about the real meaning of a national language for the NY Times. It’s as good a time as any to revisit his piece here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/opinion/language-diversity-america.html)
