Yiddish 
Willkommen "welcome"
Willkommen "welcome"
Introduction
Yiddish belongs to the Western group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is likely that it arose in central Europe between the 11th-13th centuries AD from Middle High German dialects and has been spoken by the Ashkenazi* Jews of Central and Eastern Europe and their descendants around the world ever since then.
Yiddish has sometimes been described as a dialect of German, probably because both originated in Middle High German. However, the two languages are not mutually comprehensible; Yiddish grammar is quite different from that of German as a result of contact with Slavic languages; Yiddish is culturally distinct from German; Yiddish and German have not shared the same territory for many centuries.
*Ashkenaz was the medieval Hebrew name for Germany.
At the start of the 20th century, Eastern Yiddish emerged as the national language of a large Jewish community in Eastern Europe with a rich literary and theater tradition. It was one of the official languages of the Belarusian SSR, and was used as a medium of education in Poland. Among European Jews, it contended with Modern Hebrew as a literary language .
In the years before the Holocaust, there were probably 10-11 million Yiddish speakers worldwide. As a result of the Holocaust, cultural assimilation in America and in the USSR, and shift to Hebrew in Israel, today, there are probably fewer than 2 million speakers left, most of whom no longer use Yiddish as their primary language. It remains the everyday language only in a few Orthodox and Hasidic communities In recent years, as a result of renewed interest in Ashkenazi culture, Yiddish language courses are being taught in universities and Jewish cultural organizations. There are more than 100 newspapers, magazines, radio programs, and websites in Yiddish worldwide.
Today, Eastern Yiddish is spoken by an estimated 3 million people in a number of countries of the Jewish diaspora. There are 215,000 speakers of Yiddish in Israel (Ethnologue). In the United States, most Yiddish speakers tended not to pass the language to their children who assimilated and spoke English, with the possible exception of some Orthodox Jewish communities, especially in Brooklyn.
Click here to learn more.
Click on the MLA Interactive Language Map to find out where Yiddish is spoken in the U.S.
Dialects
|
Yiddish has two main branches: Eastern and Western. References to the language without either qualifier normally to apply to Eastern Yiddish. Eastern Yiddish
The Eastern dialects differ from one another in vocabulary and grammar, but most significantly in the pronunciation of certain vowels, e.g., "dove" is toyb in Northeastern, toub in Mideastern, and tub in Southeastern variants. Western Yiddish Speakers who grew up in the United States often speak a language that represents a mixture of various Eastern Yiddish dialects. Because it has never been the official language of a sovereign state, there is no official dialect of Yiddish. Since the end of the 19th century, however, a de facto literary dialect called Standard Yiddish has evolved, based largely on the grammar of Southeastern and the pronunciation of Northeastern Yiddish. It is the dialect usually taught in schools and used in most modern publications, even though it does not exactly represents anyone's native speech. |
Structure
Sound System
|
The sound system of Yiddish is very similar to that of Standard German. Some of the main differences between the two languages are listed below:
Click here to learn more. |
|
Yiddish and German share a number of similar grammatical structures but there are also significant differences between the two languages.
Word order Click here to learn more about Yiddish word order. |
|
Yiddish and German share a large portion of their vocabularies. In addition, Yiddish has borrowed a large number of Hebrew, and to a lesser extent, Aramaic words, including religious, scholarly, and everyday items. Later, when most European Jews moved eastward, Yiddish borrowed words from Slavic languages. Yiddish/Slavic bilingualism resulted in widespread Slavic influences on Yiddish at every level.
Click here to listen to Yiddish phrases and expressions. Below are the Yiddish numerals 1-10.
|
Writing
|
The Yiddish language is written with the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet was originally an abjad, i.e., it had letters for consonants only, but it was later adapted to indicate vowels. In Yiddish, words of Aramaic and Hebrew origin are written using the traditional orthographies of the source languages. All other Yiddish words are written in an adapted Hebrew orthography that uses some Hebrew consonant letters to represent vowels. Other letters that can serve as either vowels or consonants are differentiated by combining diacritical marks with the base character. Additional phonetic distinctions between letters that share the same base character are also indicated by diacritics, or by the adjacent placement of otherwise silent base characters. Orthography has varied from place to place, and has changed over time. A standard orthography promulgated by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has only recently gained general acceptance. Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Yiddish. You can compare the transliterated text to German to see similarities and differences between the two languages.
|
|
Yiddish words in American English |
Resources |
Click here to find out where Yiddish is taught in the United States. Online resources for the study of Yiddish language and culture |
Interesting Facts
|
Sholom Aleichem Sholom Aleichem's work has been widely translated. The musical "Fiddler on the Roof" (1964), based stories about Tevye the Milkman, was the first commercially successful English-language play about Eastern European Jewish life. |
 Isaac Bashevic Singer |
Isaac Bashevis Singer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), 1978 Nobel laureate in literature, is the most famous Yiddish writer of the 20th century. Singer published 18 novels, 14 children's books, a number of memoirs, essays and articles, but he is best known as a writer of short-stories. Although he emigrated to the U.S. in 1935, wrote nearly all his work in Yiddish. Singer's work is indebted to great Yiddish writers, such as Sholom Aleichem, but is much more modern in its approach in addition to being shaped by his American experience. Singer's characters—often Holocaust survivors haunted by their immediate past and disoriented by American reality—dramatized the conflicts of American Jews. Click here to learn more. |
 | How difficult is it to learn Yiddish? There is no data on the difficulty of Yiddish for speakers of English. |
Copyright 2007 © National Virtual Translation Center