ABSTRACT
Chicago is often called an archetypal U.S. city, given its location in the Midwest and its history as a place to which multitudes of migrants headed for ambition and “self-making” (Spears, 2005, p. 8). This history is notable for its multilingualism (Farr, 2008a), even as Checagou when Native Americans used Ojibway as a trading language, before 1760 when Europeans and Africans began to arrive (and the Haitian Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, of both French and African origin, founded Chicago). The city grew as a trading center, and then with industrialization became a magnet both for domestic migrants and for very large numbers of Europeans during the latter half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Over the course of the twentieth century, especially during its final decades, immigrants from Asia and Latin America, in fact from all over the world, came to Chicago to work. Today Chicago is a vibrant urban center of about three million people with extensive multilingualism (and multiliteracy). Although English is by far the most dominant language, adopted by ethnic communities over the generations, the living presence of other languages is notable in homes, churches, stores, and other workplaces, as well as on radio and television stations, in newspapers, and on neighborhood signs.
