President Donald Trump signed an executive order Saturday making English the official language of the United States. Many other countries have an official language, but the U.S. had never had one until now.
According to the White House, designating English as the official language “promotes unity, establishes efficiency in government operations, and creates a pathway for civic engagement.” Critics of the executive order have characterized it as anti-immigrant and xenophobic.
Thirty-two U.S. states have already designated English as an official language, and three of them — South Dakota, Alaska and Hawaii — have also recognized Indigenous languages as official. Washington state does not have an official language.
Trump’s order means the government and organizations that receive federal funding are no longer required to provide language assistance to non-English speakers.
While the great majority of Americans are proficient in English, a significant number are not and Trump’s order could impact how they navigate a number of things from tax forms to accessing government services.
The most recent census data shows around 27.6 million people in the U.S., or 8.7% of the population age 5 and older, spoke English less than very well.
In the Seattle area, the percentage is a little higher. About 365,000 people in our metro area, or 9.5% of those age 5 and older, were not fluent in English.
The data comes from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey for 2023, which is the most recent release. The Seattle metro area includes King, Pierce and Snohomish counties. The area had a population 5 years and older of more than 3.8 million in 2023.
Among the 50 largest metro areas, Seattle had the 18th-highest share of the population who did not speak English very well. The top metros were, as you would expect, places with some of the highest percentages of foreign-born residents. Miami ranked No. 1, with 25% of the population age 5 and older not speaking fluent English. Los Angeles was second, at 22.5%, followed by San Jose at 21%, New York at 18%, and San Francisco at 17.5%.
The lowest percentage was in the Pittsburgh metro area, at just 1.9%, followed by Virginia Beach, Va., at 2.5%, St. Louis at 2.6%, Cincinnati at 2.8% and Birmingham, Ala., at 3%.
Among the 365,000 Seattle-area residents who had some difficulty speaking English, Spanish was the most common language, with an estimated 105,900 speaking it at home. Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese, ranked second, with roughly 57,400 speaking it at home, followed by Vietnamese at 33,800, and Russian and Korean, both at around 22,500.
There was a wide variation in the ability to speak English fluently among people who spoke another language at home.
For example, Hindi is among the commonly spoken languages in the Seattle area, with around 42,200 people speaking it at home. But only 4,300 Hindi speakers, or about 10%, did not speak English very well. English, of course, is widely spoken in India.
Among people who spoke Spanish at home, around 38% did not speak English fluently. Among those who spoke Chinese at home, 45% were not fluent in English, and among Korean speakers, 51% were not.
The Census Bureau also records the number of limited English-speaking households, which are defined as households in which no one, among those age 14 and older, is fluent in English. In the Seattle metro area, there were around 77,000 limited English-speaking households, or close to 5% of the 1.6 million households.
Census data shows that in 2023, for the first time, more than 1 million people in the Seattle metro area, among those age 5 and older, spoke a language other than English at home. The majority of those people were also fluent in English.
It’ll take some time to see how government agencies respond to Trump’s order. It will likely be uneven, as the president has made providing language assistance optional.
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