Why isn't English the official language of the United States?
It is incomparable in matters of size any European country with the United States. Geographically, the North American country occupies more space than all of Europe, large dimensions that not only entail climatic or seasonal differences, but above all a great diversity of cultures, customs, histories and traditions. Of course, the language also plays an important role in this distinction. Just as we know that in Spain the official language is Spanish, in France French, in Italy Italian and in Great Britain English, In the United States, despite what was generally thought, there is no official language. Normally, all those audiovisual productions that come from the United States are usually in English, like the vast majority of literature, and even the media use this language as the main channel. However, the American citizen does not have an official language, since there is no specification as such in its Constitution.
It is true that English is the most spoken language in the United States, given a population of some 331.9 million people, according to 2021 data, some 217 million people speak English, language followed by Spanish, spoken by about 45 million. However, neither the Constitution nor any Federal Law establishes that the official language of the more than thirty states is English, so it is the responsibility of each state to regulate it on their own. In other words, there is an official language per state, and the reality is that the majority choose English as such, while in some places it is chosen as the co-official language: this is the case, for example, of Hawaii, whose official languages are English and Hawaiian, or South Dakota, which are English and other native languages. For its part, Spanish is spoken above all in the states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas or Colorado, among others.
Settlers and immigration
But why don't they declare one language as the official one for all states? It all has to do with the birth of the United States: its founding fathers considered that individual freedom and the rights of citizens also affect the language. In this way, they considered that, instead of imposing a language on their citizens, they should be the ones who freely chose the language in which they wanted to speak. It should be noted, in this sense, that before English swept this country, Spanish was spoken. "The first people who spoke Spanish inhabited this region even before the United States existed as a territory. Therefore, this language has always been spoken in certain parts of the country," explains Rosina Lozano, professor of History at Princeton University. Thus, Spanish arrived in these lands with the first Spanish expeditions, and it was not until a century After the Spaniards who landed in the United States, the English arrived. "But the widespread use of English arrived in the 19th century," says Francisco Moreno-Fernández, a professor at the University of Alcalá. massive that happened in this same century, which brought to the country communities that spoke German, Italian or, again, Spanish, among other languages.
