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…..
