President Signs Order Declaring English Official Language of US

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump wasn’t just playing golf during his stay in South Florida this past weekend. On Saturday he signed an executive order designating English to be the official language of the United States.

Like many of the orders he’s signed since taking office, the move was the fulfillment of a campaign promise. However, unlike some of his more sweeping orders, this one does not require any major changes to federal programs.

What it does do is rescind a federal mandate issued by former President Bill Clinton that departments and agencies and recipients of federal funding provide language assistance to the nation’s non-English speakers.

But it does so softly. For instance, the order signed Saturday doesn’t say agencies can’t still provide documents and services in languages other than English to those who need them.

Nevertheless, the order cheered the president’s conservative base.

“This is HUGE,” wrote conservative activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, on the X social media platform last week after he learned of the then-pending announcement.

“In an era of mass immigration, asserting the English language as the American language, is a message of national UNITY,” Kirk said.

“This is long, long overdue,” Sen. Eric Schmitt, R- Mo., agreed, also on X.

“America is not just an abstract ‘idea.’ It is a nation and a people, with our own distinct history, heritage, culture and language,” Schmitt wrote. “In this country, we speak English. It’s about time our laws reflected that.”

Trump has been talking about designating English the official language of the U.S. since his first run for president, in 2015.

During the quest for the Republican nomination that year, Trump criticized opponent and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish at a campaign event.

A short time later, onstage during a candidate debate, Trump was asked about that criticism.

“Well … I did it a little bit half-heartedly, but I do mean it to a large extent,” the future president said.

“We have a country where you have to assimilate, and doing that means you have to speak English,” he said. “To have a country, we have to have assimilation.

“And I’m not the first one to say this,” Trump continued. “ We’ve had many people over … many, many years saying the same thing.”

On Saturday, the order Trump signed expanded on that sentiment.

“Establishing English as the official language will not only streamline communication but also reinforce shared national values, and create a more cohesive and efficient society,” it said.

At present, 31 states — both “red” and “blue” — have adopted English as their official language, with 27 of them doing so since the 1980s.

In addition, over three-quarters (78.3%) of the U.S. population aged 5 and older speak only English at home, according to the 2018-2022 American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau. 

The remainder of the population speaks other languages at home, with Spanish, at 13.4%, being the second most common language.

Though the founders failed to include guidance on an official language for the nation in either the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, a movement to establish English as at least first among equals has been afoot since the late 18th Century.

Among the movement’s most successful protagonists was Noah Webster, the son of a weaver and farmer in colonial Hartford, Connecticut.

Unlike his five siblings, Noah Webster was highly educated and eventually earned a law degree at Yale University.

For much of his life, Webster worked as a lawyer and an educator, but his burning desire in life was to create a truly American language that was based upon British English, but also distinct from it.

His first attempt at this was his creation of what is believed to be the first American textbook for grammar school students, the so-called “Blue-Backed Speller.”

The book itself was a success — at one point it was said to have even out-sold the Bible — as a result of its having been adopted for use in classrooms across the country.

However the project hardly made Webster rich, and so in 1806 he began to publish a series of dictionaries.

His greatest work wouldn’t be published until April 14, 1828, after spending some 18 years working on it.

But Noah Webster’s “American Dictionary of the English Language” was a game changer.

The two-volume dictionary set contained 70,000 defined terms, including 12,000 that had never been in a dictionary before.

Most important of all, it was the first major published work on language to draw major distinctions between American and British English.

Among other things, it’s why Americans today write “center” instead of “centre,” “humor” instead of “humour,” “color” instead of “colour,” and “flavor” instead of “flavour.”

While there was some resistance to Webster’s take on the American language — we didn’t adopt the spelling “tung” for “tongue,” for instance — he eventually won out, partly my arguing the spellings better represented how we, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, pronounced certain words.

For all his lasting influence — after all, who hasn’t used a Merriam-Webster dictionary at some point in their life? — Webster saw very little in terms of the sales of his dictionary in his lifetime.

The original print run of the “American Dictionary of the English Language” reportedly sold only 2,500 copies.

Deeply in debt, but unbowed, Webster mortgaged his home to develop a second edition of the “American Dictionary,” which was published in 1840, and begin work on the third edition. His death on May 28, 1843, came just days after he completed his latest list of new definitions.

Later that year, the rights to Webster’s dictionary were acquired by Charles and George Merriam, printers and booksellers from Springfield, Massachusetts. 

It was they who came up with the idea of condensing Webster’s two-volume dictionary into one fat book, making it, among other things, far more portable.