[Federalist] 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 The order also rescinded a 2000 Bill Clinton mandate requiring aid-dispensing agencies to provide language assistance to non-English speakers, while leaving the door open to agencies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. |