Making English the official US language can’t erase the fact that the US has millions of Spanish speakers and a long multilingual history

By Daniel J. Olson, Purdue University

English should be the official language of the United States, says a new executive order signed by President Donald Trump on March 1, 2025. The move follows the Trump administration’s termination of the Spanish-language version of the White House website and its Spanish-language account on X, formerly Twitter.

Both were abruptly shut down within hours of Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Visitors to whitehouse.gov/espanol were met with “page not found” and a “GO HOME” button that sent the user to the English-language page. This button was later updated to read, “GO TO HOME PAGE.”

In halting its Spanish-language communications, the White House is ignoring the demographic reality of the US and rejecting a long-standing tradition in American government of making key civic information accessible to the public. These changes, while mostly symbolic, signal the Trump administration’s unwelcoming stance toward Spanish specifically and multilingualism in general.

US is a Spanish-speaking country

“This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish,” Trump said in a 2015 debate during his first presidential run.

But, as a linguist specializing in Spanish and bilingualism, I know that this is simply not true. Historically, the US has had no official language, and Spanish was spoken in the lands that now make up the US well before the country’s founding.

Spain founded its first permanent settlement in what’s now Florida in 1565, nearly 50 years before English settlers established Jamestown and the colony of Virginia. Spanish settlements in the Southwest began in the early 1600s, and large numbers of English speakers did not arrive there until the mid-19th century.

Today, approximately 43 million people in the US speak Spanish as their primary language, representing roughly 14% of the entire population. If those who speak Spanish as their second language are included, then the US is the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world after Mexico.

Beyond population size, Spanish speakers help power the US economy, contributing an estimated US$2.3 trillion. That’s more than the gross domestic product of any other Spanish-speaking country in the world. With the help of its Spanish-speaking population, Miami is the financial and commercial capital of Latin America.

An inclusive communications strategy

Responding to this demographic reality, the Spanish-language content was first included on the White House webpage in 2001 by the administration of George W. Bush, a Republican.

In a press release, the Bush White House said that the new WhiteHouse.gov website would now “accomodate Spanish-speaking visitors.” It included both Spanish-language translations of the English materials, as well as feature stories relevant to the Hispanic community.

The Bush White House’s website was inclusive in other ways, too, with enhanced content for people who are hard of hearing or visually impaired and special content for kids.

The Obama administration maintained WhiteHouse.gov/espanol from 2009 to 2017.

Under the first Trump administration, however, the page was quickly removed. At the time, the White House said that the site would be restored shortly.

That didn’t happen. The page did not reappear until the Biden administration in 2021.

Following the latest removal of whitehouse.gov/espanol, a White House spokesperson has again said that the administration is “committed to bringing back” the website, although no timeline was given.

US has multilingual history

The Trump administration’s effort to limit White House communication in languages other than English breaks with not just the recent past but also with the earliest traditions of the republic. Since the inception of the country, there has been a concerted effort to provide information to the public in relevant languages.

For example, the US Constitution was translated into German and Dutch in 1787 and 1788, languages that were widely spoken at the time, especially in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. These translations helped inform the public of the country’s foundational values and allowed for public engagement and participation during the ratification process.

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican–American War and redrew the southern boundaries of the US, was written in both Spanish and English, ensuring that Spanish speakers in the territories newly claimed by the US were informed about their citizenship and rights.

Translators who spoke everything from Italian to Turkish to Albanian were stationed at Ellis Island in the early 20th century to help register and assist immigrants arriving to New York from across the globe. A few decades later, the US government produced World War I propaganda posters in various languages, hoping to convince a culturally and linguistically diverse American public to support the war effort, buy war bonds and enlist in the military.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion and sex, also laid the legal foundation for multilingual services in federal assistance programs. In government programs such as Medicaid, people who speak a language other than English are entitled to treatment equal to that of English speakers.

The US has never embraced multilingualism. History is rife with campaigns to suppress “foreign” and Indigenous languages. But as these examples show, the US has often taken a policy approach that acknowledges the linguistic needs of the US public.

Spanish on the campaign trail, not in the White House

Even Trump, who has made anti-immigrant and especially anti-Latino rhetoric a centerpiece of all his candidacies, released multiple Spanish-language advertisements during his 2024 presidential campaign, in hopes of improving his standing with Latino voters.

His campaign released several ads targeting swing states with large Spanish-speaking populations, such as Arizona and Nevada, and in October 2024 Trump even participated in a town hall meeting on the Spanish-language channel Univision, where audience members asked questions in Spanish.

These voters helped put Trump into office: Exit polling data shows that Trump won 42% of the Latino vote in the 2024 race, the highest percentage for a GOP candidate in at least 40 years.

The federal government continues to host Spanish-language information on a variety of agency websites and offers multilingual support for key civic processes, such as filing taxes and requesting passports. The shuttering of the Spanish-language White House website seems largely symbolic.

His executive order making English the official language of the US may end up being largely symbolic as well. It allows federal agencies to continue providing information in other languages, effectively separating Trump’s public stance from its practical implementation.

But for a president with a staunch anti-immigrant attitude, symbolism is politically advantageous.

Trump, it seems, is willing to use Spanish on the campaign trail when it benefits him while reinforcing a public narrative of rejecting Spanish and Spanish speakers.

Daniel J. Olson, Professor of Linguistics and Spanish, Purdue University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.