The News
US President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order Friday designating English as the country’s official language for the first time.
The order would rescind a Clinton-era mandate that required the government and other recipients of federal funding to provide language assistance to non-English speakers.
More than 30 states already have English as their official language, but decades of efforts by lawmakers to designate it as the national language have been unsuccessful. More than 350 languages are spoken in the US, according to the Census Bureau.
A summary of the order said the goal was to ”promote unity, establish efficiency in the government and provide a pathway to civic engagement,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the move.
Trump has long railed against the use of languages other than English in the US: In 2015, he criticized former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail, and the new administration quickly removed the Spanish-language version of the White House website soon after taking office.