As the number of languages spoken in the suburbs grows each year, reaching out to non-English speakers can be a little tricky, as one public library found out.
With their facility under renovation, the staff at the Indian Trails Public Library in Wheeling decided to hand-paint welcomes in various languages on the drywall at the library entrance.
However, it turns out the “warm welcome” proclaimed in Turkish actually read “cold welcome.”
The chagrined but wiser staff–who learned not to fully trust what they find on the Internet–rewrote the welcome.
It is no easy challenge, one that Indian Trails shares with other libraries in the northwest suburbs: how to sate the reading hunger of a growing number of patrons whose native tongue is not English.
The Wheeling library’s effort began with the realization that “the community has become much more multiethnic than it was 15 to 20 years ago,” said Tamiye Neehan, director of Indian Trails, which until recently had just a few shelves each of Spanish and Russian materials.
Late last year, Neehan formed an advisory committee, searching the community for native speakers of as many different languages as she could find. Statistics were collected from local high schools. Surveys were conducted in churches.
The variety of languages uncovered was even wider than anticipated: Korean, Polish, Turkish and Gujarati, an east Indian dialect, in addition to Russian and Spanish.
According to Grant Winsauer, director of vocational education and grants for Township High School District 214, 30 languages are spoken in the homes of students in the district’s high schools.
Wheeling High School has 630 students who come from homes where a language other than English is spoken, Winsauer said. Rolling Meadows and Buffalo Grove High Schools have 432 and 310 non-English households respectively.
The figures at the schools parallel the rising demand for non-English language materials in the public libraries. And if a recent survey by the North Suburban Library System is any indication, the range of nationalities being stirred into the northwest suburbs may be even wider.
According to the survey, northwest suburban libraries offer materials in more than 50 languages, including Afrikhans, Armenian, Bengali, Estonian, Farsi, Khmer, Laotian, Latvian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Tagalog (Philippines), Tibetan, Ukrainian and Urdu.
The survey periodically updates the non-English language materials available among the system’s 680 academic, public, school and special libraries in northern Cook County, Lake County and parts of Kane and McHenry Counties.
Instead of rushing to expand their foreign-language collections, the Arlington Heights Memorial Library and other libraries work with local school districts to provide instruction in English as a second language.
In yet another approach, a consortium of libraries that includes Arlington Heights, Indian Trails, Des Plaines, Skokie and Park Ridge share in the operating costs of the Library Cable Network, which broadcasts “Crossroads Cafe.” The sitcom is designed to help viewers learn how to speak English, according to Debora Meskauska, a spokeswoman for the Arlington Heights library.
An early chapter in this effort was written by the Skokie Public Library. “Historically we had a collection of western European languages, primarily for those who studied French or German in school and wanted to keep it up,” said Carolyn Anthony, the library’s director.
Then about 10 years ago, library staff started noticing a change in population and more demand for materials in Asian and Russian languages. Anthony says the library now has 1,900 books in Russian, 1,294 in Korean, slightly less than 1,000 in Chinese and smaller collections of Polish, German, French, Hebrew, Spanish, Hindi and Vietnamese.
Purchasing the material, Anthony says, can be “tricky.” Skokie librarians discovered that a lot of Russian-language material is published in the former Soviet Union and is of “poor quality,” she said. “Frequently it has to be sent out to be re-bound.”
Just finding material can be difficult. “Major languages–you can always find publishers and distributors that will carry those,” said Joan LaMarque, outreach and reference librarian for Rolling Meadows Public Library. “But when it gets to the exotic languages it can be more difficult.”
Of course, once the material is in hand it takes someone who understands the language to catalog it. “If somebody donates books in Arabic, and if you have no one on staff who speaks the language, it’s very hard to catalog them,” LaMarque said. “You have to know what you have.”
But any efforts–even the off-base Turkish translations–tend to have positive results.
A story about the Indian Trails efforts with the Korean language that ran in the Korean Times, a Chicago-based Korean-language newspaper, indirectly helped fill the Wheeling library’s shelves.
“We got three calls from a man in Ohio who is mailing us a batch of children’s books (in Korean),” said library director Tamiye Neehan.
