Making English Our National Language Is One Step Toward A More Unified Country: Expecting Everyone to Speak English is a Recognition of Reality and a Signpost for New Americans Seeking to Assimilate and Prosper; Why English Makes the US Stronger

By admin On Mar 17, 2025

Making English Our National Language Is One Step Toward A More Unified Country:

Expecting everyone to speak English is a recognition of reality and a signpost for new Americans seeking to assimilate and prosper.

Last Friday, Donald Trump signed an executive order making English the official language of the United States, ending 249 years of the country not having any official language, a designation the U.S. shared with only Mexico and the Pacific archipelago nation of Palau. The order also rescinded a 2000 Bill Clinton mandate requiring aid-dispensing agencies to provide language assistance to non-English speakers, while leaving the door open to agencies to do so if they choose. While the Left will undoubtedly cry “nativism” and “xenophobia” over the coming days, the order’s wording, historical perspective, and common sense show this is a necessary step to strengthen “melting pot” by uniting as “a citizenry that can freely exchange ideas in one shared language.”

First, it’s necessary to understand why America never had an official language. From its colonial beginnings, America had an Anglophone supermajority but a smattering of other languages. At the nation’s founding in 1776, New York, Pennsylvania, and sections of the Appalachian backcountry harbored large minorities of German and Dutch speakers, and establishing a state language went no more with the libertarian character of the Revolutionary generation than establishing a state religion, which the First Amendment expressly forbade. But America’s political economy assured voluntary assimilation anyway, and America’s great Founding documents and debates, from the Federalist Papers to Common Sense, were in English, a shared language that brought the Union together and made its ideals legible to citizens in South Carolina just as for Massachusetts.

For the next century and a half, the absence of a welfare state incentivized almost all Americans to learn English and preserve our linguistic commonality even if they remained bilingual or spoke another language at home. In a world with no public safety net, learning the language that 90 percent of your potential employers, customers, employees, and clients speak is a no-brainer. Thus, by 1800, almost all Germans living in Philadelphia (one-third of the city) spoke English. A century later, most Germans who had settled in the Midwest were at least bilingual, and some knew only English. By the mid-20th century, most of the Poles, Italians, Hungarians, and other Eastern Europeans who arrived in the great immigration wave of 1880-1914 spoke English, and the number of Italian-Americans that speak the old country’s language today is 550,000, well under 5 percent of all Americans of Italian heritage. That is no mystery — those groups arrived in the U.S. overwhelmingly before the New Deal and Great Society welfare programs existed and thus assimilated faster than more recent waves of immigrants.

Today, while many immigrants strive for the American dream and learn English on their way to assimilation, the existence of a vast state and federal welfare system has slowed the process for some and halted it for others. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 8.3 percent of Americans do not speak English “very well” (admittedly an amorphous line). That is one in twelve Americans for whom our common debates are inaccessible, or accessible only through imperfect translations, for whom the Preamble or the Gettysburg Address do not have the cadence and clarity they possess only in English. Where America’s traditional impetus to assimilation is enervated by government meddling in the economy, an executive order like Trump’s, which explicitly seeks to “help newcomers engage in their communities, participate in national traditions, and give back to our society,” makes perfect sense. —>READ MORE HERE

Why English makes the US stronger:

“Official” is a very English word. It has its roots in the Old French “oficial” and the Latin “officialis,” and now — thanks to a new Trump executive order — describes the status of the English language.

President Trump’s executive action making English our official language repeals a Bill Clinton executive order that required the government, as well as groups receiving federal funds, to provide language assistance to non-English speakers.

Trump’s move will have little practical effect, since the increase in bilingualism in the United States has been driven by high levels of immigration from Spanish-speaking countries rather than direct government action.

Still, the executive order is an important symbolic statement and its basic premises are correct.

“A nationally designated language,” the executive order says, “is at the core of a unified and cohesive society, and the United States is strengthened by a citizenry that can freely exchange ideas in one shared language.”

This is certainly true of having an overwhelmingly dominant language, whether it is technically designated the official language or not.

The order is hateful and threatening to all those groups for whom e pluribus unum — to resort to a long-dead language — no longer has appeal.

The communications director for the pro-immigration group United We Dream huffed, “Trump is trying to send the message that if you’re not white, rich and speak English you don’t belong here. Let me be clear: Immigrants are here to stay. No matter how hard Trump tries, he can’t erase us.”