[DoreenMichele]

The US is a mostly monolingual "country of countries." They are called states because they were envisioned as separate nation-states who shared an army for purposes of self defense.

The original charter was a sort that historically never really worked anywhere and it was failing to provide funds, iirc, for paying for defense. So they gave the federal government more teeth and it became some weird beast of a sort the world had not seen before.

And here we are, with this strange beast still behaving strangely all these years later.