Even though the United States is the go-to place for English speakers in that part of the world, surprisingly, it doesn’t officially declare English as its language.

Official languages are something we rarely ponder about, right? Typically, you’d reckon the most widely spoken language in a country is also its official one. Well, you’d be spot on about 92% of the time because 180 countries have an official language, and over 100 have multiple official languages.

But hold up, if you applied that logic to the U.S. and assumed English was the official language, you’d be off the mark.

The truth is, the U.S. doesn’t even pick ANY language as its official one, hard as it may be to believe. To get why, let’s take a quick trip back to the 18th century, the time when the United States of America was taking its first steps.

Most countries go for an official language to set up a clear way for people and officials to communicate, making it a breeze to introduce laws and rights. It also serves a social role, preserving cultural identity and fostering national unity.

However, when the U.S. was getting started, the notion of having an official language, like English, didn’t sit well with some folks. It clashed with the core principles the country was built upon – individual liberty and equality.

Back in the 1770s, English was the big shot language in the American colonies. But guess what? People spoke a whole bunch of languages, especially those from the European countries they hailed from. So, you had folks in the U.S. chatting away in German, Dutch, Flemish, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Gaelic, Portuguese, Italian, and, of course, English.

Worries cropped up that picking just English as the official language might not be fair or might cause division since the country was a melting pot of migrants speaking different languages.

Over time, there’ve been pushes to make English the official language, but they’ve regularly hit a brick wall.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “People in the U.S. communicate in more than 350 languages.” And besides English, some of the most common ones are Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic.