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Yiddish is the language of the Ashkenazim, central and eastern European Jews and their descendants. Written in the Hebrew alphabet, it became one of the world’s most widespread languages, appearing in most countries with a Jewish population by the 19th century. Along with Hebrew and Aramaic, it is one of the three major literary languages of ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Yiddish ( ייִדיש, יידיש or אידיש, yidish or idish, pronounced [ˈ (j)ɪdɪʃ], lit. 'Jewish'; ייִדיש-טײַטש, historically also Yidish-Taytsh, lit. 'Judeo-German') [9] is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originates from 9th century [10] : 2 Central Europe, providing the ...
- ≤600,000 (2021)
- Central, Eastern, and Western Europe
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- What Is Yiddish?
- The Origin of Yiddish
- Early Yiddish
- Early Modern Yiddish
- Modern Yiddish
- Yiddish in The 20th Century
- Post-Holocaust Yiddish
Literally speaking, Yiddish means “Jewish.” Linguistically, it refers to the language spoken by AshkenaziJews — Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, and their descendants. Though its basic vocabulary and grammar are derived from medieval West German, Yiddish integrates many languages including German, Hebrew, Aramaic and various Slavic and Romance...
It is impossible to pin down exactly where or when Yiddish emerged, but the most widely-accepted theory is that the language came into formation in the 10th century, when Jews from France and Italy began to migrate to the German Rhine Valley. There, they combined the languages they brought with them, together with their new neighbors’ Germanic, pro...
In Ashkenazi societies, Hebrew was the language of the Bible and prayer, Aramaic was the language of learning and Yiddish was the language of everyday life. Scholars refer to this as the internal trilingualism of Ashkenaz. Though they vary in sound and use, all three languages are written in the same alphabet. The first record of a printed Yiddish ...
Yiddish publishing became widespread in the 1540s, nearly a century after the invention of the printing press. To ensure the broadest possible readership, books were published in a generic, accessible Yiddish, without the characteristics of any particular Yiddish dialect. In the 1590s, the Tsene-rene (also called Tzenah Urenah) was published for th...
The late 19th century saw the birth of modern Yiddish literature. The “grandfather” of this new literary movement was Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, known by his pen name Mendele Mokher Seforim (Mendele the Bookseller). I. L. Peretz, a Polish writer, poet, essayist, and dramatist became known as the “father” and humorist Sholem Aleichem, born in Ukrain...
In 1908, the first international conference on Yiddish language (the Czernowitz conference) declared Yiddish to be “a national language of the Jewish people.” The purpose of the conference was to discuss all the issues facing the language at that time, including the need to establish Yiddish schools, to fund Yiddish cultural institutions and to est...
On the eve of World War II, there were roughly 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world. The Holocaust destroyed most of this population. In America after the war, immigrant parents were often hesitant to speak Yiddish with their children. Though there were a few networks of Yiddish schools in the post-war period, after-school programs and camps co...
- Mordecai Walfish
The Development of Yiddish: Four Stages. Linguists have divided the evolution of Yiddish into four amorphous periods. Over the course of the greater part of a millennium, Yiddish went from a Germanic dialect to a full-fledged language that incorporated elements of Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages, and Romance languages.
YIDDISH LANGUAGE, language used by Ashkenazi Jews for the past 1,000 years. Developed as an intricate fusion of several unpredictably modified stocks, the language was gradually molded to serve a wide range of communicative needs. As the society which used it achieved one of the highest levels of cultural autonomy in Jewish history, the Yiddish ...
In Yiddish, unlike Hebrew, there is a widely-accepted standard for transliterating Yiddish into the Roman alphabet (the alphabet used in English). This standard was developed by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the recognized world authority on Yiddish language, history and culture. Although the YIVO standard is widely accepted in ...
Yiddish is the historic language of Ashkenazic (Central and East European) Jewry, and is the third principal literary language in Jewish history, after classical Hebrew and (Jewish) Aramaic. The language is characterized by a synthesis of Germanic (the majority component, derived from medieval German city dialects, themselves recombined) with ...
