English as the Official Language of the US: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Executive Order 14224

Kyra Ray
Dr. Darrin Hetrick, Faculty Mentor

This study examines President Trump’s Executive Order (EO) 14224, titled Designating English as the Official Language of the United States, and its effects on contemporary U.S. language policy. The paper investigates both the EO and the news article’s framing of the EO. I analyze three articles from each of the following political designations: right-leaning, center, and left-leaning. This study employs Fairclough’s (2012) critical discourse analysis (CDA) techniques to analyze the EO and these articles. The preliminary findings indicate that monolingual ideologies are evident across most sources that echo President Trump’s language ideology, and that the EO relies on typical English-only discourse to promote monolingual language ideologies. This is relevant as historically the U.S. had been a very multilingual and multicultural country with no official language designation.

 

Keywords: linguistics, language policy, English-only movement, language ideology, critical discourse analysis, multilingualism, linguistic discrimination

Topic(s):Linguistics

Presentation Type: Oral Presentation

Session: TBA
Location: TBA
Time: TBA