President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Friday designating 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 funding to choose whether to continue to offer documents and services in language other than English, according to a fact sheet about the impending order.
Designating English as the national language “promotes unity, establishes efficiency in government operations, and creates a pathway for civic engagement,” according to the White House.
Within hours of Trump’s inauguration last month, the new administration took down the Spanish language version of the official White House website.
Hispanic advocacy groups and others expressed confusion and frustration at the change. The White House said at the time it was committed to bringing the Spanish language version of the website back online. As of Friday, it was still not restored.
Remind me again how you pronounce “herbs” or “aunt” over there
You’re right, those should also be changed. Let’s get rid of the letter C too while we’re at it. It makes the K sound or the S sound, we already have letters that do that, it’s useless.
As great as reinventing the English language sounds, it’s not realistically going to happen in a meaningful way, and making small regional changes (like the differences in the spelling of some words) is just confusing and annoying to everyone who isn’t familiar with it or with English in general.
With your example of the letter C, you’d need some alternative way to write the “ch” sound (which is sometimes pronounced as “sh”, depending on it’s usage) if you got rid of that letter.
It’s an ugly, messy, and confusing language. Popularising arbitrary changes like the ones Webster included in his dictionary (centre vs center, for example) serves no benefit to anyone - it just creates yet another variant of an ugly, messy, and confusing language.
I agree it would be difficult at first. There is precedent for it though, we’ve already gotten rid of thorn and ethel in the last few hundred years.
I have a plan, we use X. It most commonly makes the KS sound, we already have K and S to handle that. X is already used for the CH sound occasionally, so just lean into that and make it X’s main role. “Xange the xannel please I hate Foks News”