President Donald Trump is set to declare English as the country’s official language in an executive order, a White House official told The Wall Street Journal Friday morning.
Trump’s executive order rescinds a Bill Clinton-era order from 2000, which required all entities operating on federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English speakers.
Revoking this blanket regulation on translation, Trump’s order is likely to give federal agencies the discretion to decide when providing language services is necessary.
The White House explained the necessity for the change in a fact sheet obtained by Politico. “While over 350 languages are spoken in the United States, English remains the most widely used across the country,” it stated.
The statement continued, “This order celebrates multilingual Americans who have learned English and passed it down, while empowering immigrants to achieve the American dream through a common language.”
Of the 195 countries in the world, 180 have an official language, leaving the U.S. as an outlier, the White House added.
Currently, 32 states including Utah, California and Idaho have declared English as their official language.
Trump has long advocated for establishing English as the country’s official language, as Time reported the president dismantled the Spanish version of the White House website during both his first term and second term.
Trump’s executive order follows a long history of rejected bills that aimed to make English the United States’ official language.
The first attempt was made in 1923 with the King-Cramton Bill, and most recently, Vice President JD Vance co-sponsored the English Language Unity Act in late-March 2023.
Professor of language and literacy at Purdue University Wayne Wright explained why he believes the U.S. has never needed an official language to CNN in 2018.
“The Founding Fathers didn’t see a need to declare one,” Wright said. “English was pretty much the dominant language of the United States at the time so there really wasn’t a need to protect it. And they didn’t want to offend their fellow Americans who helped fight for independence.”