It might be the first time that Bad Bunny has been suspected of cribbing from Irving Berlin.

Near the end of his Super Bowl halftime show, the Puerto Rican rapper said, “God bless, America.” For many Americans, they were the only words they could understand and ones they, presumably, appreciated.

We’ve come a long way, though, from Irving Berlin’s World War I-era song that asks for God’s blessings on America and invokes the geographic majesty of our vast nation “from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam.”

Bad Bunny didn’t mean America the country, but America the continents. He name-checked the United States only in a list of other countries in the Western Hemisphere, and only toward the end.

With apologies to Lee Greenwood, Bad Bunny is proud to be an American — just not an “American” like most people in the United States think of it.

The NFL made history with the show in two ways. For the first time, it had a performer who sang in a language about 85% of the U.S. population doesn’t speak.

Also, for the first time, the NFL gave its stage to a performer who sought to put the country in its place and undermine its claim to be called “America.”

In an echo of singer Billie Eilish inveighing against America stealing land at the Grammy’s, Bad Bunny said of his language proficiency in a pre-Super Bowl press conference, “English is not my first language. But it’s OK, it’s not America’s first language either.”

This sounds clever until you give it a moment’s thought. Bad Bunny’s first language, Spanish, was a colonial imposition in the Western Hemisphere beginning in 1492. If the rapper wanted to associate himself with languages prior to this wave of European settlement, he’d have to sing in, say, Nahuatl or Algonquian.

It’s true that the Spanish language got a head start over English in what’s now the United States, when Ponce de Leon showed up on the Florida peninsula in 1513. But so what? English-speakers forged a permanent presence at Jamestown in 1607. They then populated the Eastern Seaboard, won their independence, established enduring institutions of representative government, and made English the most important and widely spoken language in the world.

Certainly not everyone feels this way. It is people hypersensitive to any Yanqui imperialism, including “linguistic imperialism,” who complain about us hogging the name “America.”

Sad to say, they are late to the game. Americans began calling themselves Americans in the 1700s to set them themselves apart from the British. Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence said it was a statement of “the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” (subsequently changed to “the 13 united States of America.”)

Once we were the U.S.A., the question became how to refer to our people. As “United States men and women”? Various solutions were tried out before we settled on “American,” which now denotes not just our country, but a set of cultural traits.

It’s bizarre that the NFL had a halftime show that questioned this, although in the league’s defense, surely, few people picked up on it — or understood anything else said.