In any language, Chicago still a big talker - But New York, L.A. now have more foreign-language speakers, Census Bureau reports

In any language, Chicago still a big talker - But New York, L.A. now have more foreign-language speakers, Census Bureau reports
By Ron Grossman
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
9:59 p.m. CDT, April 28, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-census-language-diversity-20100428,0,3295326.story


Chicago isn't quite what it was a century ago, when the city's Association of Commerce half boasted, half complained that its "confusion of tongues is the worst since Babel."

That view of Chicago was remarked on by visitors for decades. But a new report on the nation's linguistic diversity, released Wednesday by the Census Bureau, documents how those bragging rights now belong firmly to New York and Los Angeles. Both of those cities have greater concentrations of foreign-language speakers than Chicago.

That is not to say the king's English hasn't continued to give ground to other tongues in and around the Windy City. In Middle America, Illinois is unrivaled as a home to transplanted cultures: 21.8 percent of residents now speak something other than English around their dinner tables, the report said.

Chicago still has more Polish speakers than any other American city. Its enduring linguistic stew ranks it among the top four cities with speakers of Arabic (4th), German (2nd), Greek (2nd), Gujarati (2nd), Hindi (3rd), Hungarian (4th), Italian (3rd), Korean (4th), Russian (3rd), Serbo-Croatian (2nd), Spanish (4th) and Urdu (2nd).

While the report documented a big increase in Spanish speakers throughout the U.S., Spanish now is spoken by almost a million people in Chicago and its nearby suburbs — a number equal to one-third of Cook County residents who report knowing only English, the report showed.

"That's the story of Chicago. It's no longer No. 1 in foreign-language speakers, but it always comes in second, third or fourth," said demographer Rob Paral, a Chicago-based research fellow with the American Immigration Law Foundation.

The new census report, comparing data from 1980 through 2007, found that the number of U.S. residents 5 years and older who spoke a language other than English at home more than doubled in the past three decades to 55 million, or 20 percent of the population. The number grew at a pace four times faster than the overall population growth.

Over that time period, the census found an additional 23.4 million Spanish speakers nationwide, representing an increase of 211 percent.

There was a time when Chicago didn't have to be content with place- or show-honors in America's linguistic derby. Its neighborhoods, the commerce association's 1909 "Guide Book" said, "were really little cities within the metropolis, each speaking its only language, clinging to its hereditary customs, and in large part governing itself."

For decades around the dawn of the 20th century, Chicago's factories drew more immigrants from rural regions of Eastern and Southern Europe than any other U.S. city. Now, notes geographer Irving Cutler, Europeans looking for work don't need to go overseas.

"With the European Union, they can move within the continent from where the jobs aren't to where they are," said Cutler, author of "Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent."

That translates into the linguistic shift, notes Paral. In the 1920s, when the federal government imposed strict immigration quotas, 27 percent of Chicagoans were foreign-born. By 1970 that number had fallen to less than 10 percent, even as the great influx of Spanish speakers from Latin America was beginning.

"Chicago has become a city of the children and grandchildren of immigrants," Paral noted.

Across those generations, "Old World" languages get forgotten; suburbanization also takes its toll.

For example, Cutler grew up in Lawndale, then a largely Jewish neighborhood on the West Side. It was a linguistic enclave, where, if anything, English was an exotic tongue.

"They tell me I spoke only Yiddish until the age of 5, when I went to Howland grade school," said Cutler. "My children and grandchildren don't speak Yiddish, except for a few words."

According to the new census study, Yiddish is among the languages showing sharp declines. It's down 50 percent since 1980 to about 160,000 speakers, mostly concentrated in the New York area. In Cutler's youth, he estimates, there were that many in Chicago's neighborhoods alone.

"Italian, the second most frequently spoken non-English language in 1980 (after Spanish), also had a net decline of about 800,000 speakers (50 percent decline)," the study reports. Chicago still has the third-largest Italian speaking concentration, but "Fra Noi," the community newspaper, now devotes space to lessons in that language.

rgrossman@tribune.com