President Trump signed an executive order Jan. 20, 2026, renaming English as the American language and banning the use of pronouns in all aspects of life. The executive order also established a new government agency, the Service to Terminate Unauthorized Pronouns and Illegal Discussions (STUPID), whose mission is to identify and prosecute anyone who uses pronouns, using AI and surveillance systems to ensure compliance.
To comply with the order, all pronouns in this article have been struck through, as there was not enough time before publication to rewrite the article without them.
“We’re going to change the name of our great language to be American; it should never have been English: we have always been the most important people who speak it,” said Trump, in a news conference after signing the order. “We are also getting rid of pronouns, which the radical Democrats implanted into our beautiful American language, and no one needs them, or even knows what they are.”
Critics of Trump have claimed that pronouns are natural parts of all human language, and decried the executive order as an unconstitutional attempt to regulate speech. Linguists who support them have alleged that pronouns are just any word that stands in for a noun or noun phrase. They have further claimed that pronouns are one of the basic parts of speech, alongside other parts of speech like verbs, which describe actions; nouns, which describe things and concepts; and adverbs and adjectives, which modify verbs and nouns.
“It makes absolutely no sense to try to ban pronouns,” said Norma Pearson, an American teacher at Athens Drive. “Pronouns are a fundamental part of our language that we could not do without and that you use every day; they are not some political invention or made-up thing,” she said.
Some have suggested that, when the order refers to pronouns, it specifically means personal pronouns, though nothing in the order says this. No such clarification was issued by the White House when asked, and language experts claim that personal pronouns are just as much a normal part of human language as other types of pronouns allegedly are.
“Personal pronouns are a group of pronouns which specifically stand in for people or things, such as he or it,” said Pearson. “Out of every language spoken by humans, all have personal pronouns. Some people think some of them are ungrammatical, for example, using they for a single person. Those people are quite plainly wrong: singular they, for example, has been part of English since at least the 1300s. Personal pronouns are not some crazy thing made up for political gain; they are a basic, foundational part of language.”
STUPID, the agency which was formed by the order, has been empowered to use pre-existing surveillance technology and private cameras shared with the police to find people who use pronouns in their lives. An AI program has been developed to search data collected from these mass surveillance programs to detect people who use pronouns, and to automatically charge them with crimes, without any warrants or oversight.
“In cooperation with police departments and private citizens, we will be able to suppress pronouns much faster and efficiently than we could ever have dreamed of,” said a STUPID spokesperson. “Anyone who worries about ‘mass surveillance’ and ‘the oppression of protected free speech’ should know their worries are fully baseless; we are only targeting felons engaging in the criminal act of using pronouns. If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be scared.”
The executive order Trump signed, titled “Restoring Some Other Names That Also Honor American Greatness,” in reference to the title of his earlier executive order that ordered the Gulf of Mexico renamed, also directs the U.S. government to refer to the English language as American, and empowers the Justice Department to prosecute organizations and school systems which continue to refer to it as English. Supporters have claimed the change is necessary for the modern world, as England has a small percentage of English speakers when compared with the U.S., while others have claimed the U.S. government lacks the power to regulate a language spoken by an estimated 1.3 billion people across the globe, not just in the U.S.
“It’s absurd to call it the American language,” said Amir Ikan, Professor of American Language Studies at UNC. “It’s called English because its first speakers were the English people, just like Spanish and French and Chinese are named after the cultures they originated in. English is a global language spoken throughout the world, with wide varieties in many different places. Calling the American variety of English the ‘normal’ variety and forcing everyone else to call their own languages varieties of an American language implies that other varieties of English are lesser than American English, and entirely ignores the fundamental realities of language,” he said.
As of publication, STUPID agents have reportedly begun planning operations in predominantly liberal cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and even Raleigh. Many Democratic politicians and activists have reported being fined, or even being sent threats of imprisonment, for their use of pronouns and for continuing to refer to American as English. Critics of STUPID have gathered in nationwide protests, expressing their worry about what they call government persecution of free speech and selective enforcement of new laws to target political opponents.
“It is absolutely abhorrent for the government to just decide it has the power to ban the use of an entire natural class of words, and to punish politicians and activists they don’t like for using them while letting ones they do like go free,” said an organizer of the protest movement in Raleigh, who requested anonymity out of a fear of persecution by STUPID. “We cannot just stand by and watch, and let the government suppress their political opponents and force people to conform to their idea of government-approved speech.”
