Words never stand still; they move. Even though some people try to keep them fixed in place. In March 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the country’s official language. The reasoning was simple: “A nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society.”
His message was milder than that of another president, Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote in a 1919 letter: “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns out people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polygot boarding house.”
Trump would later change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
In the country’s 250-year history, no one had managed to impose an official language. “Although the order does not ban languages other than English, it sends an unprecedented signal that they are not welcome,” reflects linguist, writer and translator Ross Perlin. “The main target is Spanish, which fortunately remains the country’s second most spoken language.”
Today, New York is home to more than 700 languages, most of them brought from elsewhere and spoken primarily rather than written. The new rule also revokes a 2000 executive order requiring federal agencies to develop plans to assist people who do not speak English.
“Trump’s order is a blatant attack on the many Indigenous languages that form the foundation of the nation. More than 300 were spoken north of the Rio Grande when Europeans arrived,” says Perlin.
British linguist David Graddol once estimated that between 500 million and 1 billion people spoke English as either a first or second language. “It is a losing battle to fight the current,” says Jacques Lévy, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and a native French speaker. English, he adds, is merely the latest in a long line of global languages. “It could have been another language. First it was Greek, then Latin, later French, and now English.” Fair enough. But is it English — or American?
U.S. linguist John McWhorter wrote in Words on the Move: Why English Won’t — and Can’t — Sit Still (Like, Literally) (2016) that “changes in meaning are as natural to words as changes of pitch are to music.” McWhorter explains that “whelm” once meant what “overwhelm” means today.
But this is an American story, not an English one.
In the collection Bilingual Blues: Poems 1981–1994, Cuban American author Gustavo Pérez Firmat writes: “The fact that I/ am writing to you/ in English already falsifies what I / wanted to tell you./ My subject: / how to explain to you that I / don’t belong to English / though I belong nowhere else.”
“I have been fortunate enough to write in two languages, neither of which truly belongs to me,” he says. “As a Cuban, or an American, or neither one nor the other, I believe these changes are not for the better. I like rice and I like mango, but arroz con mango gives me indigestion.”
Yet by that logic, “Americanized English” is already undergoing a profound transformation, reflecting the influence of Latino and African American communities, growing diversity and the impact of social media and advertising. The idea was already present, despite some resistance, in the minds of the Founding Fathers.
Even Noah Webster, the lexicographer behind the first major American dictionary, wrote in 1789: “As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” He added: “Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard.”
There is a growing tendency to shorten words. “You’re in your Benz, I’m by the gate,” sings Gracie Abrams in her global hit I Love You, I’m Sorry.
Another example is Justin Bieber’s song Yukon, where he sings: “‘Member you used to drive a Yukon. I pick up whenever you call. In the parking lot in Tucson.”
Abbreviations such as ’cause (because) and ’till have been common since the 1970s. The change has been underway for decades.
In the 1982 song Atlantic City, Bruce Springsteen sings: “And the D.A. can’t get no relief” — abbreviating the words district attorney to D.A.
A different kind of English is emerging. Take this other example from Bieber, this time in Daisies: “If I could get in, drop me a pin, hop in the whip and come over.”
“It is true that words and expressions are becoming shorter,” confirms Mauro Guillén, dean of the Wharton School.
Perlin agrees: “You do not need to be an etymology expert to see how English vocabulary is expanding, especially in technical fields. Modern English is so rich because it absorbed words from Latin. But a small portion also comes from Spanish.”
After this journey through language, Perlin published Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (2024). “African American English and Spanish are becoming increasingly influential,” he says. “It is difficult to determine whether these influences are making American English (which is far from monolithic) even more distinct from other varieties of English, because it increasingly seems to be following specifically American (linguistic) patterns.”
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