Erin Allen: Good afternoon, I'm Erin Allen and this is The Rundown. About one third of the people in Chicago over the age of five speak a language other than English at home. And for many of them, it's English, not that other language that was once foreign to them. The most common language besides English that Chicagoans speak is Spanish and after that it's Chinese languages, Cantonese, Mandarin. And after that it's Polish. But Chicago is an international city, there are so many more languages than those that people speak here. Today I'm talking with my colleague, Amy Qin, who's a data reporter at WBEZ. She has been looking into the most common languages spoken in the city, who's speaking them and the broader context of migration, immigration, culture and community. Amy, welcome to The Rundown. 

Amy Qin: Hey, Erin. Happy to be here.

Erin Allen: So what inspired this look into what languages people speak in the city?

Amy Qin: Yeah, so I usually wear my headphones everywhere I walk, but my headphones broke. And it took a long time for me to replace them. So I started walking around just actually listening to the sounds of my neighborhood. And I heard so many different languages walking around. I live in Edgewater. I think on one afternoon, I heard a family speaking Spanish, some elderly folks speaking Russian, Arabic, all on my block. And so that kind of got me thinking, you know what other languages are spoken in Chicago and where, and being a data reporter, I decided to look into it and map it all out.

Erin Allen: So there are almost 20 different groups of languages that you kind of identified other than English spoken in Chicago. And there are quite a few neighborhoods where those languages are concentrated. How did you choose which areas to visit and speak to people for the story?

Amy Qin: Yeah, so I took a look at census data for languages spoken at home for people ages five and older by zip code. And what I saw was, you know, obviously, the Spanish was concentrated on the southwest and Northwest sides, and also just the most common language and most zip codes in the city. But there were a few areas of the city where the most common language after English wasn't Spanish, it was Polish, Chinese and a language category that includes many South Asian languages. And so that's kind of how I decided where to focus my reporting on.

Erin Allen: Can I ask why you chose to Polish and the Chinese languages as opposed to focusing on that, that really big Spanish speaking population?

Amy Qin: Yeah, I kind of wanted to like, peel back the layer. Initially, the map I looked at was just the most common language spoken in each ZIP code. And then I decided to map the second most common language other than Spanish. And that was a totally different map with just I assigned different colors to the languages and it was just like so many different colors on the map. And so that's kind of what motivated me was like, okay, Spanish is the most common language other than English, but besides that, like what other languages do people speak?

Erin Allen: Okay. complicate the narrative a little bit. Yeah. Okay. So in your story, you mentioned the term point of entry. Can you just talk about what that refers to and how it affects where certain languages are spoken in Chicago?

Amy Qin: Yeah. So a point of entry neighborhood, according to some advocates, is a community where new immigrants choose to live either because of proximity to family and friends who already live there, or support services where people can learn English or get help with city services. And so it's an area of the city that's easiest for someone who's moving to a new country and doesn't speak the language. And so those are the kind of most common places people choose to settle. One of these places is Westridge. It's actually the community area with the highest population of Chicagoans born outside of the US. About 32,000 people are born outside of the US so about 40% of Westridge is immigrants.

Erin Allen: Where is Westridge?

Amy Qin: It's on the far north side. So if you think about Uptown, it's about like, a couple neighborhoods northwest of Uptown. 

Erin Allen: Okay, so speaking of people who come from outside of the country, many of these folks are learning to speak English, but they're also committed to maintaining their native tongue for some of them. What are some of the reasons they gave you for keeping up with their first language?

Amy Qin: Yeah, so I spoke to a couple of people who are recent immigrants, but clearly told me that they want to continue speaking their home language at home with their family, because they want to keep that part of their culture through the language. So I spoke to Hui Ming Lin, who recently came from Taiwan to Chicago. And she's determined to learn English, she spends six to eight hours of her day just consuming American media, practicing English online. But when she comes home, she speaks, intentionally so, Mandarin with her 27 year old son, Kevin, mostly because she wants him to retain his Mandarin. He came over as a kid from Taiwan moved to New Jersey and then to Chicago and became fluent in English. But you know, with a lot of second and third generation families, sometimes the language the home country gets lost. So she was very intentional about that. But for other people I spoke to, Ali Shah who's a refugee from Afghanistan. He kind of speaks his home language out of necessity, because he doesn't yet feel comfortable speaking English to his family and his most of his family is still in Kabul. And so when he video calls his family, he just speaks in Farsi, which is what he spoke back at home.

Erin Allen: Yeah. This story is about language, but it's also about family and access to resources. What are some of the other components that came to the forefront after you started off, looking mostly at language?

Amy Qin: Yeah, so another aspect of this is the issue of access. You know, for a lot of new immigrants who don't speak English, or aren't fluent, there's so many things that they need to figure out. Like how to pay your bills, get health insurance, things are things that are hard for everyone, but even harder if you're not fluent in written English, or reading English. And so a lot of ESL teachers often go above and beyond, not just to create community with the students in their classroom who might be coming from different walks of life or coming on their own because they're seeking asylum in the U.S., but also to help students translate their lease or, you know, figure things out. And so I talked to an ESL teacher at the Chinese Mutual Aid Association and Uptown and she said that their ESL classes are actually in the same building as several other kind of social services. And so after class she'll like physically just walk with them to someone else who can help them get utility assistance, and she'll help translate or, you know, help kind of mediate and so I think there's, you know, the language learning aspect of it, but also learning how to operate in a new country in a new language.

Erin Allen: Yeah. And then speaking a shared language in say Uptown or Westridge, you know, everyone around you, you have your community around you, that all kind of speaks that language. And you have this, maybe feeling of incredible connection between everyone around you. But did you notice a difference in how connected people felt to Chicago as a whole, depending on how fluent they were in English?

Amy Qin: Yeah, I think it's a lot easier to navigate the city outside of these port of entry neighborhoods, or kind of ethnic enclaves, where you hear a lot of people speaking the same language you do. It's a lot easier to navigate Chicago once you're more fluent in English. And so for Hui Ming Lin, when she first came to Chicago, she would go to Chinatown once, twice, three times a week, just to be able to converse with strangers and not have to struggle to find the right words. But now that she's more fluent in English, she has friends throughout the city and her son Kevin says that she's always traveling to new neighborhoods in the city to meet these friends. And so for her, like connecting to Chicago was a lot easier once she became more fluent.

Erin Allen: Does she ever go back to Chinatown?

Amy Qin: She does. She goes back once a week to have soup dumplings. Which is what she craves a lot of the time.

Erin Allen: I would love to hear like anything else you've learned or, or thought about differently when it comes to the way that you report from this story.

Amy Qin: Yeah, the other thing that I think I really appreciated while I was doing a story was, you know, for a lot of immigrants and you know, personally speaking, my parents are Chinese immigrants, there's this kind of motivation to get here and learn as much about American culture and assimilate and participate in American life and learn the language as quickly as you can. But there's also this kind of like pull factor where people are really intentional about keeping their culture alive through their language. And because of this, Chicago is home to is just so many enclaves where it feels like you're not in Chicago anymore. You know, you go to Chinatown, you go to Westridge, Pilsen, and it just feels like you've stepped into a different country. And, I like, reporting the story I like mainly just appreciate that a lot more and it was it was really cool to be a part of.

Erin Allen: Yeah. Amy Qin is a data reporter at WBEZ you can read her story on language and the Windy City at wbez.org. And that's it for The Rundown today. I'm Erin Allen, talk to you again bright and early tomorrow morning.

WBEZ transcripts are generated by an automatic speech recognition service. We do our best to edit for misspellings and typos, but mistakes do come through.