President Donald Trump is expected on Friday for an executive decree to establish the English language as the official language of the United States.
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Friday that will designate English as the official language of the United States, according to the White House.
The order will allow government agencies and organizations that receive federal funds to choose if they continue to offer documents and services in a language other than English, according to an informative sheet on the imminent order, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The decree will annul a mandate of former president Bill Clinton that required that the government and organizations that received federal funds would provide linguistic assistance to people who did not speak English.
Appointing English as a national language “promotes unity, establishes efficiency in government operations and creates a path for civic participation,” according to the White House.
The United States has never had an official language at the federal level, but the issue has been problematic for some states.
The use of Spanish in public life has raised controversies for years in places such as the state of Texas, where a state senator in 2011 demanded that an immigrants' rights activist speak in English and not in his native Spanish at a legislative hearing.
This revived a debate of decades about whether it is correct to speak Spanish in Texas, which was part of Mexico and, before that, of the Spanish empire.
(With information from Reuters and The Associated Press)