THE LEXI-CON ARTIST

Donald Trump’s choice of vocabulary may seem curious, but it makes sense when you look at how the founding fathers created America out of words, writes Robert McCrum

- Robert McCrum

A few weeks ago, I received a call from Voice of America (VOA), notorious during the Cold War for its loony tunes anti-Soviet propaganda. Happily, those brave old days lie in the dustbin of lost causes, but the human animal is never exempt from history. In the bitter spring of 2025, VOA – now more of a television station than a radio arm of American foreign policy – was reporting on the frenzy of Trump’s first 100 days, in particular the president’s executive order declaring that English should be the official language of the United States.

In the perverse, and sometimes baffling, style of Trump 2.0, this may feel peculiar for a president known for his curious choice of words (the tariff retreat, we are told, was made because the markets were getting a bit “yippy”) and equally so that this channel should have migrated from super-power rivalry to the politics of the lexicon. But, as the author of The Story of English (1986), I told the VOA researcher I had plenty to say about English as the official language of this embattled republic.

Since the Declaration of Independence asserted the rights of “We, the people”, words have played a vital role in the remaking of American society. According to one French diplomat, who travelled with General Washington in the 1780s, there was a fierce appetite among some American firebrands for “a new language”, with “some persons desirous… that Hebrew should be substituted for English”.

As well as flirting with the language of the Bible, one or two hotheaded legislators even toyed with the idea of adopting Greek as America’s official language. This proposal was rejected on the grounds that it would be “more convenient for us to keep the language as it was, and make the English speak Greek”.