Is English Really the Official Language of the United States? It Depends.

On March 1, 2025, the President of the United States signed one in a seeming endless stream of executive orders, or EOs, as they are often known. This EO ostensibly established English as the official language of the United States. This isn’t the first time people have tried to pull this off. There is a long history of such attempts. We explore those attempts, the legal weight of this EO and at least one other, and the implications the EO might have for public education, in general, and multilingual education, in particular. Along the way, we learn about arcane but important political facts surrounding the statehood efforts of Arizona and New Mexico in 1912, as well as what presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Obama had to say about multilingual education, whether in an EO or through other means. There’s no guest for this episode, unless you include the recorded voice of Al Jazeera reporter Heidi Zhou-Castro, some persons-on-the-street interviews she conducts, and former Senator Barack Obama, speaking to us across time and mediums in the form of a prescient speech about bilingualism he delivered in Powder Springs, Georgia on July 8, 2008. Listen, fact-check us, and send us your corrections and sentiments to languagegoestoschool@gmail.com or @languagegoestoschool on Facebook and Instagram.