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Cook County, Illinois

I heard on the radio this morning that Cook County, the home of Chicago, Illinois has 135 languages spoken within it's boundaries.

AND, 35%.....that's THIRTY-FIVE PERCENT of the households in the county do not use English as the language spoken in the home.

Spanish, Polish, one of the Chinese dialects. What the heck are the OTHER 132 languages???

Comments (7)

Let's see, there are about 100 Chinese dialects (give or take a few), so that narrows the field down quite a bit.

German, French, Italian, Serbic, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, and Polynesian dialects are the languages that I can come up with at such short notice.

I guess Cook County is a real cultural melting pot.

It truly is, Dr. D. Most likely we could add a number of central European languages, Irish, Indian and Pakistani dialects, and those from Scandinavia too. And Vietnamese. I'll have to see if I can find a list of the 135 and post it.

I've heard it said that Chicago has the largest concentration of Polish people outside of Warsaw.

Thats a lot of languages in a little area. Wow.

Thats a lot of languages in a little area. Wow.

Thats a lot of languages in a little area. Wow.

tag:

During the 90s, it was estimated that on average 2 languages a week became extinct as the last person who could speak them died. It's an amazing world out there.

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