I live in Chicago, which always has been a multilingual place. The first non-native settler was a black French-speaker named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who established a farm at the mouth of the Chicago river in 1780. His being black was unusual, but his speaking French in the area was not: French had been spoken, along with a number of Indian languages, in the area starting with the colonizing adventures of Père Louis Joliet and Père Jacques Marquette in 1673.
[In a curious aside, when writing my novel “Skyscrapers,” I described an actual scene, a drowning, which took place in Michigan when I was young. I used the word “bayous” which is how Michiganders describe small inlets: I have a cousin who lives on one, and a nephew who lives on another. My editor questioned this word use, saying it suggested alligators to most people. But of course it dates from the French period in the Great Lakes, as does the Père Marquette River, the Des Plaines River, and so on.]
As the area grew in population, wave after wave of immigrants brought their languages along with them. When I ran a non-profit called Reading Is Fundamental in Chicago, we were donating free books to 160,000 schoolchildren a year. These poverty-level kids didn’t have books in the home because money had to go for basic necessities. But only a portion of our kids were native-born. Many were first-generation immigrants, but many were immigrants. We had refugees from wars such as the war in former Yugoslavia and the war in Vietnam (they didn’t occur at the same time, but refugees don’t always come in on a straight track, either. Some spend years in detention camps waiting for papers.)
Chicago is the second largest Polish speaking city after Warsaw. It will soon have a Spanish speaking majority (by around 2025, it is estimated). Some of Chicago’s schools have 25 languages spoken in a single school: a challenge for the teachers, but a wonderful learning opportunity for the students. They learn to respect other languages and to aspire to speak more than one language just by virtue of being in a classroom where so many languages are spoken, and each valued. In most elementary schools, teachers only teach in English, but even this is changing. Two of my grandchildren are in bilingual Spanish classes all day long.
I learned French in high school (along with four years of Latin). Oh, how handy this came in when my husband was transferred to Paris for three years. The boys (aged three and four) learned two new phrases on their first day in school: “Ne fais pas ça,” (“Don’t do that), and “Je veux faire pipi,” (I want to pee). French teachers obviously knew how to deal with non-francophones quickly and effectively. I learned Spanish by teaching myself, by language tapes, by Rosetta Stone (an interactive computer program) and by watching telenovelas which are common on Chicago’s Hispanic television. This will help in my summer project, a three-week total immersion in Spanish in Madrid. I still have some rough spots I need to smooth out to feel really fluent in Spanish.
Why learn other languages? Communication, of course. Americans often won’t even try to speak another language but in Europe it is highly respected if one tries, even if one massacres the language. To not try, to expect others to speak your language because it is yours, is considered arrogant. As the world becomes smaller and interactions closer and more constant, two or three languages should be considered minimum. It enriches the mind to be able to think in more than one language, and it enriches our understanding of others and their many wonderful cultures.
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