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While Chicago is no longer #1 in foreign language speakers, it’s still known as one of the country’s biggest melting pots. In fact, only one-third of Cook County residents speak only English. Nationwide, a new census report (data from 1980-2007) shows that the number of residents over 5 years old who speak a language other than English has more than doubled, equaling 20% of the population.

Chicago has seen an interesting linguistic shift due to a change in immigration patterns. While Spanish is still on the rise, many “old world” European languages like Yiddish and Italian are declining.

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 still has more Polish speakers than any other city in the U.S., and comes in 2nd, 3rd or 4th in many other languages: “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).”

Read the Chicago Tribune’s full report on its local language phenomenon here.

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