Talk:United States

How about Spanish to be listed in the official languages section

There have been a lot of instances about the Spanish language being used in some signage in the US, including announcements. I’m not sure if you should include it, even though the US doesn’t have an official language, and I think the way they called it official languages is incorrect. ~2026-48346-33 (talk) 16:18, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

English is described per two recent RFC discussions (see Frequently Asked Questions above, no. 11). The mentions of Spanish are appropriate: taught as a foreign language in schools but never an academic requirement (unlike French in English-speaking Canada or Swedish in Finland). Mason.Jones (talk) 19:57, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

But shouldn't we also include Spanish in the official languages section, where English is obviously listed here? Tourists who visiting the US can instantly communicate in Spanish without learning English, especially once from a Spanish-speaking country. There is obviously signage and announcements that appear in Spanish alongside English. ~2026-50826-58 (talk) 23:19, 20 September 2026 (UTC)

That does not show that it is an "official" language, simply that it is used in some areas. And I doubt very much that Spanish can be understood "instantly" everywhere in the US. Meters (talk) 05:44, 21 September 2026 (UTC)

English should also be omitted because the executive order that was issued, namely E.O. 14224, only affects federal departments. For any language to be recognized as official, there needs to be an act of Congress followed by any necessary judicial review to make it permanent and legally binding. As H.R. 1772 and H.R.1862 have been in committee since March 2025 without progression to the general chamber of the House of Representatives, it would be misleading to state that English is currently the official language of the United States.

It would instead be more appropriate to re-label this section as "Commonly Used Languages" which links to the Languages subsection under Demographics or a redirect link to the main article Languages of the United States. This main article also covers the subject of the status under the E.O. and congressional acts. Metroinberlin (talk) 01:24, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 23 September 2026

Observers since Alexis de Tocqueville have characterized American society as materialist, noting a strong cultural emphasis on material prosperity and physical comfort. In the 20th century, historians and social scientists described the United States as a consumer society, in which mass consumption became central to economic policy, citizenship, and national identity. Psychological research has also examined the prevalence of materialist values in the U.S. and their relationship to well-being.

Rationale:

• Due weight: The characterization of American culture as materialist is one of the most persistent themes in scholarship on the United States. It runs from Tocqueville (1840) through Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and postwar histories of consumer culture to contemporary psychology. An article of this scope that covers American culture without mentioning it omits a major, well-documented perspective.
• Neutrality: The text is attributed to named observers and scholars rather than stated in Wikipedia's voice, and it uses "materialist" in its descriptive cultural sense (an emphasis on material goods and prosperity), not as a pejorative or a claim about the country's founding philosophy.
• Verifiability: All claims are supported by major works from mainstream academic and trade publishers.
• Placement: The addition is short (three sentences) and sits in the culture section, where it summarizes an established scholarly theme without unbalancing the article. ~2026-51527-65 (talk) 16:54, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want made. Please detail the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Also read WP:NOLLM. Tbhotch^™ (CC BY-SA 4.0) 17:02, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

References

Changing the title from "United States" to "United States of America"

Replace United States with {{subst: United States of America}} RickScott8276 (talk) 18:38, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

@RickScott8276 See the FAQ at the top of this talk page. Thanks, Knitsey (talk) 18:41, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

usa

how big is the USA in square miles in 2025 ~2026-52279-97 (talk) 13:01, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Approximately 3,809,525 square miles (including 600,000~ square miles of rivers, lakes etc). Also, it's 2026. aesurias (she/her) (talk) 13:06, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Superpower status

The superpower talk page is a mess, so I figured I'd look at some of the entities on there and see how they are doing. Superpower is mentioned 11 times in the current article. The main issue is that superpower status is not universally defined, and the United States current superpower status is contested in some reliable sources. I believe this is only one or two of the mentions. Per WP:SERIOUSLYCONTESTED: "If different reliable sources make conflicting assertions about a matter, treat these assertions as opinions rather than facts, and do not present them as direct statements in wikivoice." Some sources:

• Some even suggested that the distribution of power had changed so much in the first 10 years of the new millennium that it would be quite meaningless to think of the world in terms of any kind of superpower determination. That age, it was agued, was now past.

  — International Encyclopedia of Political Science

• When asked whether they consider the US to be a superpower in 2030, 61 % say yes while 24 % say no.

  — Gallup International

• “The book also rejects the counter liberal argument that the United States is, indeed, a superpower, which has used its material and human resources incompetently,” Kolodziej said. “According to this train of thinking, all that is needed is a better management of its soft and hard power to retain what is misguidedly assumed to be the continued superpower status of the United States.”

  — U.S. no longer superpower, now a besieged global power, scholars say

• "What is left is the U.S. as great power, in that 19th-century sense, where the term “great” reflects a mathematical calculation of raw capability and territorial ambition."

  — The U.S. is no longer a superpower

More exist, but the term itself is disputed in a modern context. Yes, sources clearly exist that do describe it as a contemporary extant superpower, but that does not mean it isn't seriously contested. I believe the best solution is to avoid the use of the ambiguous term when describing the contemporary US, or make it clear that it is an opinion. The superpower status of the United States prior to the collapse of the USSR seems fairly uncontested in sources. While it is an opinion, it does look like before that time it was pretty universal, so this only applies to contemporary claims. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 07:40, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

"The superpower status of the United States prior to the collapse of the USSR" At the time, the U.S. was the supposed leader of the Free World, and had enormous influence in Europe. This is no longer the case. Per the main article on the concept:

• "the term became more widely used against the USSR and its allies during the 1950s in the wake of the Truman Doctrine, when the United States depicted a foreign policy based on a struggle between "a democratic alliance and a communist realm set on world domination", according to the American magazine The Atlantic. The term here was criticized again for including right-wing dictatorships such as Francoist Spain, and Nikita Khrushchev said in the 21st Congress of the Soviet Communist Party that "the so-called free world constitutes the kingdom of the dollar"."
• "Although in decline after the mid-1970s, the term was heavily referenced in US foreign policy up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. After the presidency of George H. W. Bush the term has largely fallen out of use, in part for its usage in rhetoric critical of U.S. foreign policy.".
• No Soviet Union, no reason for most countries to align with the United States. Dimadick (talk) 11:28, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

  I'm not sure, so am going to ask for you to clarify. Are you agreeing we should change the way we refer to the modern US, or are you opposing such change? GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 20:03, 11 October 2026 (UTC)