The Guardian - Donald Trump is planning to sign an executive order that would make English the official language of the US for the first time. The order would also rescind a federal mandate issued by the former president Bill Clinton that agencies and other recipients of federal funding are required to provide language assistance to non-English speakers, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.
The US has never had a national language at the federal level in its almost 250-year history. Given the nation’s long history of taking in immigrants from around the world, hundreds of languages are spoken in homes and businesses across the US and Spanish is especially prevalent.
The move is also just the latest in a series of symbolically nationalist executive orders, including one renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America in official government documents and reverting the name of Denali – North America’s highest mountain – to Mount McKinley, swapping a Native American name for that of a former US president.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, a White House summary of the order said the goal of making English the national language was to “promote unity, establish efficiency in the government and provide a pathway to civic engagement”. Agencies would still be allowed to provide documents and services in languages other than English under the order, according to the summary.
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