Multilingual Chicago

[muckefuck]

Recently I wrote a post in another forum listing all the languages which I had personal overheard spoken in Chicago. I thought I'd reproduce that here, but with the added value of trying to rank the languages roughly according to frequency.

Daily

English (American, AAVE)
Russian
Spanish (Latin American)


Over the Course of a Week

Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
Chinese (Putonghua)
French
German
Hebrew
Korean


Over the Course of a Month

Amharic
ASL
Chinese (Cantonese)
Hindi/Urdu
Japanese
Polish
Thai
Vietnamese


Over the Course of a Year

Arabic
Aramaic
Bengali
Dutch
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Igbo
Italian
Khmer
Lao
Latvian
Panjabi
Persian
Portuguese
Rumanian
Somali
Tagalog
Turkish
Ukrainian
Wolof


A Least Once in a Decade

Belizean Kriol
Catalan
Hungarian
Irish
Malayalam
Mayan
Swedish
Schwyzertüütsch
Teochiu
Welsh

Comments

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

Impressive - a number of these I would never be able to recognize or distinguish, especially the Hindi/Bengali/Gujarati/Panjabi, not to mention Russian/Ukranian. I had never even heard of Teochiu.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

See below. In several cases, it's a fairly certain educated guess rather than a definite ID.

[n-true.livejournal.com]

Ah, so you're linguoboy! I had no idea... or maybe I forgot.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

That's an adorable way of spelling Schweizerdeutsch!
...do I sound provincial enough now?
I got to hear Hmong and Shan on the NY subway this year, identified for me by a handy anthro friend, but I confess I wouldn't know if I'd heard Teochiu, Mayan, Malayalam, Igbo or a number of others here.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I had to ask the Mayans and the Malayalis. Igbo I was able to deduce from the spelling of the cabbie's name and the Teochiu-speaker was a friend.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

You heard the ASL? I'm impressed!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I have NINJALIKE hearing!

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

I can't remember whether I've told you this story yet or not, so bear with me. I was once on the 55th street bus coming back to HP with tyrannio and our friend N. There was a young man that was talking on his cell phone and alternating between perfectly native-sounding Chicago African-American English and a language I didn't recognize. In the English portion he was exhorting somebody to get off their butt and get a job, any job, McDonalds, OK? I'm guessing he was saying much of the same in the other language.

I was too shy to ask him, "hey, what language is that", so once we were off the bus I asked tyrannio and N. tyrannio said it was Hebrew!