Illinois Culture & Language

Illinois is the country's demography in one state: German the largest ancestry at 15.8 per cent, Irish 10.5, Polish 6.1 with the largest Polish-American population of any state, Italian 5.5; Hispanics 19.4 per cent, three-quarters Mexican-American and the largest share in the Midwest; Black Illinoisans 15.3 per cent, concentrated in Chicago and its south suburbs since the Great Migration; Asians 7.1 per cent, Indian, Filipino and Chinese first. A quarter of households speak another language at home, Spanish for 14 per cent of the population and Polish for a sizeable community. Religion follows: nearly a quarter Catholic, with the first American-born pope a Chicagoan; 36 per cent Protestant, Methodists and Southern Baptists the largest; 3.7 per cent Muslim, the largest share of any state; and over 300,000 Jews in the Chicago area.

The music is Chicago's gift: the Delta blues electrified by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon on Chess Records after 1943, which gave rock and roll to Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones their name; gospel from the 1930s; house music, invented in the city's clubs; the Chicago Symphony, one of the Big Five since 1891, with its summer at Ravinia; and the free Blues Festival in June and Jazz Festival over Labor Day weekend. The architecture is the other: the Chicago School and the steel-framed skyscraper after the fire, Burnham's Plan of Chicago of 1909, the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the world in Oak Park, the Sears Tower that was the tallest building on earth for 25 years, and a river cruise ranked among the top ten tours in the country.

Sport is tribal: the Cubs at Wrigley, the second-oldest park in the majors, who waited 108 years for the 2016 World Series; the White Sox on the South Side; the Bears' nine championships; the Bulls' six titles under Michael Jordan; and the University of Illinois's 59,000 students and the Fighting Illini. Downstate, the culture is the State Fair in Springfield since 1853, Lincoln's Springfield, the Amish and German towns, Farm Aid's first concert at Champaign in 1985, and a Superman festival in a town called Metropolis.

English is spoken natively by nearly 80 per cent and fluently by almost everyone else; a quarter of households speak another language at home, Spanish above all -- 14 per cent of the population -- and Polish for a community that is the largest of any state, with Chinese, Tagalog, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic in Chicago's neighbourhoods. Chicago English has its own vocabulary: the L is the train, the Loop is downtown, the expressways have names not numbers -- the Kennedy, the Dan Ryan, the Eisenhower -- a gym shoe is a sneaker, pop is soda, "the lake" is Lake Michigan and "downstate" is everywhere else.