Of all the reasons my husband and I decided to make New York our home twelve years ago, when we first arrived from Argentina, the city’s linguistic diversity was a major consideration. Spanish, our mother tongue, was ubiquitous, and dual-language education for our then two-year-old son was easily available in preschools; he is now learning his third language, in middle school. We soon built a community of friends in which almost everyone was bi- or multilingual, speaking, at home, many varieties of Spanish, from Peruvian to Colombian, from Mexican to Dominican, along with Russian, Hebrew, Mandarin, French, Turkish, Hindi, and Arabic—and English was our lingua franca. Hanging from a wall in our home office is a framed map of Queens, titled “MOTHER TONGUES AND QUEENS: THE WORLD’S LANGUAGES CAPITAL,” which a friend (whose mother tongue is Jamaican Patois) printed out for us from the book “Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.” It identifies where various languages are spoken in the borough—the most linguistically diverse urban community in the world—including Coptic, Quechua, Tepehua, Tlapanec, Finnish, Pashto, Ibo, and many, many more. For someone like me, raised in another country of immigrants, with one grandmother proficient in Guaraní and the other in Yiddish, my new country felt immediately familiar and welcoming.

Today, hundreds of languages are spoken in the United States. The total number is hard to establish, but it’s somewhere between three hundred and fifty (the U.S. Census Bureau’s figure) and more than a thousand. The latter estimation is from Ross Perlin, the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, an organization that has documented the presence of seven hundred and fifty languages in the New York area alone. According to the 2019 American Community Survey, around sixty-eight million people speak a language other than English at home—a near-threefold increase since the nineteen-eighties. Such extraordinary diversity flourished in the context of one exceptional circumstance: the United States was one of only a handful of countries (including Mexico, Australia, and Eritrea) to not designate an official language.

This exceptionalism has now come to an end. On March 1st, President Donald Trump signed an executive order proclaiming that it was “long past time” that English was declared the official language of the United States. The stated rationale is that “a nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society, and the United States is strengthened by a citizenry that can freely exchange ideas in one shared language.” According to a Pew Research survey from August, the measure has popular support: fifty-one per cent of Americans think that it is “extremely important” or “very important” for the country to make English its official language. For some people, instituting an official language may be a largely symbolic measure, but immigrants-rights groups fear that, particularly now, it could be used to eliminate bilingual access in education, health care, and government services—that it is, in fact, a step toward official discrimination against English learners, in violation of civil-rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on national origin. Significantly, this executive order revokes a previous one, issued by President Bill Clinton, which mandated that the federal government offer linguistic access to people with limited English proficiency. Its policy guidance noted that “the same sort of prejudice and xenophobia that may be at the root of discrimination against persons from other nations may be triggered when a person speaks a language other than English.”

Why would this country need an official language? Multilingualism has been a constant in American history. At the time of European colonization, around three hundred Indigenous languages are known to have been spoken north of the Rio Grande. In and around the island of Manhattan alone, in the seventeenth century, a reported eighteen languages were in use. At the time of the Revolution, there were so many German and Dutch speakers that, in Pennsylvania and New York, the Constitution had to be translated into those languages during the ratification process. For close to two centuries, the unofficial motto of the U.S. was a phrase in a language other than English: “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”).

By the nineteen-eighties, fuelled by a migratory influx from Mexico and Central America, Spanish had emerged as the most widely spoken language after English. Perlin told me that “the arrival of Spanish as a seriously important second language” hit “on a very visceral level.” It provoked a reaction against bilingual-education programs in public schools in states such as California—which had prospered under the Bilingual Education Act, of 1968—and spurred the rise of the English-only movement, which lobbied to make English the exclusive language of the federal government. (Earlier iterations of the movement had surfaced in various periods of tension with immigrant groups, including the burning of German books during the First World War; at the time, German was the second most spoken language in the country documented by the Census Bureau.)

One of the pioneers of the English-only movement was Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, a naturalized American who was born in Canada, to Japanese parents, in 1906. Hayakawa, who did not speak Japanese, was a fierce advocate for immigrant assimilation. He praised the internment camps of the Second World War as “perhaps the best thing that could have happened” to Japanese Americans because, in his view, they helped integrate them into American society. A semanticist and the author of a popular book about language, Hayakawa joined San Francisco State College as a professor of English in the mid-nineteen-fifties. His outspoken criticism of a student strike won him the support of California’s then governor, Ronald Reagan, and, in 1968, Hayakawa was appointed the college’s acting president. In that role, he earned a reputation for cracking down on student activism, a permanent appointment as college president, and a national profile that helped launch a political career: he was elected to the U.S. Senate, in 1976.

Hayakawa derided bilingual ballots as “profoundly racist,” stating that “the most rapid way of getting out of the ghetto is to speak good English.” In 1981, he proposed a constitutional amendment to make English the nation’s official language. It failed to pass, but when, after a single term, Hayakawa retired from the Senate, he became the honorary chairman of the California English Campaign, which in 1986 successfully promoted a ballot initiative that made English the state’s official language. He died in 1992, leaving as his legacy an organization he had co-founded, U.S. English, which still promotes the English-only cause.

Fed by growing anti-immigrant sentiment, new iterations of the English-only movement spread across the country, supporting legislation that eventually made English the official language in more than thirty states. But efforts at the federal level fell short, including a congressional attempt, in 1995, to enact a law making English the exclusive language of the federal government and repealing the bilingual requirements of the Voting Rights Act. It passed in the House—the Republican Speaker, Newt Gingrich, famously condemned bilingualism as “a menace to American civilization”—but stalled in the Senate. Three years later, in California, voters approved Proposition 227, which effectively eliminated bilingual education for most public-school students. (It was largely repealed in 2016.) In 2011, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, who was later removed from committee assignments for making racist remarks, launched another attempt to make English the official language of the federal government, sponsoring the English Language Unity Act. If passed, it would have effectively prohibited federal officials from using any language but English in government communications, restricted access to federal documents, such as tax forms and ballots, in other languages, and introduced a more stringent language requirement for naturalization. It found fierce opposition from, among others, the American Civil Liberties Union, which said, in a statement, that the act would violate the First Amendment, on the ground that linguistic access is a freedom-of-speech issue, and that it would breach the equal-protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment by excluding residents from accessing government services based on their national origin.

It comes as no surprise that this decades-long endeavor has finally succeeded under Trump. During his campaign last year, Trump said, “We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language. These are languages—it’s the craziest thing—they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.” It’s “ironic,” Perlin said, that the President was raised in Queens, by a mother who was born in the Outer Hebrides and whose first language was Scottish Gaelic. And yet Trump has chosen to embrace not immigration and linguistic diversity but the xenophobia that they have engendered.

Reaction against the executive order came, first, from major organizations devoted to the study and teaching of languages. TESOL, an association of professionals who teach English to non-native speakers, said that Trump’s order “stands in stark contrast to our nation’s rich and vibrant multilingual and multicultural past, present, and future.” The Center for Applied Linguistics argued that “the ability to speak multiple languages is both a personal and societal asset. Multilingual individuals strengthen our position in the global economy and contribute immeasurably to efforts toward peaceful diplomacy. Students who learn in two languages have stronger educational outcomes than those who learn only in English.” The Linguistic Society of America (L.S.A.) noted in a statement that multilingualism “improves cognition and health, strengthens communities and brings families together and strengthens our ability to participate as global citizens in a multilingual world. Mandating Official English will have exactly the opposite effect.”