On the Language Front*

Rough action on the language front as Donald Trump continues to fire directives from his right-wing playbook. First, he issued an executive order making English the official language of the United States. Given that this multilingual nation has functioned for almost 250 years without such a designation and has, in fact, benefited from having official documents printed in multiple languages (proclamations of the Continental Congress, war bonds, etc.), one must wonder about this latest maneuver in a centuries-old initiative that has sometimes been called English Only. Advocates have even pushed unsuccessfully for a constitutional amendment and continue to introduce bills in the national legislature. Why all the fuss when America is clearly an English-dominant society and immigrants learn English in overwhelming numbers? If not having an official language hasn’t made a difference, what difference can it make? It’s fairly simple. When people like Trump dream of a white ethnostate, they view speaking English as fundamental to American identity. Just as the writer Toni Morrison observed in Playing in the Dark, “Deep within the word ‘American’ is its association with race. … American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen” (47). English Only advocates believe that American also means speaking English (funny when the name of the proposed official language is based on the name of a foreign country, England, which has no official language). Although it’s not clear how Trump’s order would unfold in detail, you can assume that in general it diminishes the availability of information and government services, and thus opportunities, for non- or limited-English speakers.

Nothing fuzzy about the name change of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg and of Fort Moore back to Fort Benning. As a retired African American officer who served in the 82nd Airborne and was stationed at the old Fort Bragg told me, “This is a slap in the face.” This is also Trump, through Pete Hegseth, with J. D. Vance cheering on, saying that all you woke people are not going to supplant a favorite white-supremacist narrative. So those two strike down Liberty, which should be a cherished ideal, to uplift the name of a slave-owning Confederate general. Make no mistake. This is all about honoring Braxton Bragg and not about paying tribute to Private Roland L. Bragg, who served during World War I. I am sure that he served nobly, evident by the Purple Heart and Silver Star that he received. But without that surname he would not be in this week’s news. Same with Corporal Fred Benning, who also served honorably during World War I and received the Distinguished Service Cross. Fifty-one years after his death, he hit the name lottery because he shared a surname with Confederate General Henry Benning. So, Fort Moore, named for General Hal Moore and his wife Julia Compton Moore, became, while their son noticed, Fort Benning. Some of you have been hanging around The Language Lane long enough to know what to call these machinations.

And now the New York Times article, “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration.” Presidential teams always make language adjustments to reflect priorities and policies, but, of course, they don’t all make the same adjustments. According to the Times, words or terms now being discouraged or avoided in government documents and websites  include activists, allyship, assigned at birth, BIPOC, climate crisis, DEI, feminism, Gulf of Mexico (mandated term is Gulf of America per Executive Order 14172), identity, inclusivity, intersectionality, LGBTQ, nonbinary, oppression, racism, sociocultural, trans, transgender, and underrepresented.   

We get and reject the message.

#thelanguagelane #keithgilyard #EnglishOnly #FortLiberty #FortMoore

*This was written in early March but not posted because site renovation was in process.