Abstract: The aim of this article is to discuss the Yiddish varieties of Courland and Estonia in the general context of the co-territorial languages: Baltic German, Latvian, Livonian, and Estonian. As a rule, discussion of Yiddish in the region is mostly based on the classical descriptions of the Yiddish varieties from the beginning of the 20th century. It is demonstrated that common features in phonology and lexicon of Courland (and Estonian) Yiddish and Baltic German are, in fact, regional and attested at least in varieties of Estonian but often in Latvian and Livonian as well. It is argued that due to the multilingualism of Jews in the region, a wider perspective of modern contact linguistics and multilingualism and analysis is needed. In the 20th century, multilingual speech was a norm at least among Estonian Jews, and, based on fieldwork data from the 1990s among multilingual Estonian Jews, there is no clear preference of insertional or alternational code-switching. However, if alternational code-switching is preferred in a community, it might explain the low number of conventionalised lexical borrowings (as is the case for Latvian borrowings in Yiddish).
Topics: Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Left-Wing, Internet, Israel Criticism, Main Topic: Antisemitism, Social Media, Language, Linguistics, Newspapers, Magazines and Periodicals
Abstract: Yiddish was the everyday language spoken by most Central and East European Jews during the last millennium. As a result of the extreme loss of speakers during the Holocaust, subsequent geographic dispersal, and lack of institutional support, Yiddish is now an endangered language. Yet it continues to be a native and daily language for Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jews, who live in close-knit communities worldwide. We have conducted the first study of the linguistic characteristics of the Yiddish spoken in the community in London’s Stamford Hill. While Krogh (in: Aptroot, Aptroot et al. (eds.) Leket: Yiddish studies today, Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf, pp 483–506, 2012), Assouline (in: Aptroot, Hansen (eds.) Yiddish language structures, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, pp 39–62, 2014), and Sadock and Masor (J Jew Lang 6(1):89–110, 2018), investigating other Hasidic Yiddish-speaking communities, observe what they describe as morphological syncretism, in this paper we defend the claim that present-day Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish lacks morphological case and gender completely. We demonstrate that loss of morphological case and gender is the result of substantial language change over the course of two generations: while the case and gender system of the spoken medium was already beginning to undergo morphological syncretism and show some variation prior to World War II, case and gender distinctions were clearly present in the mental grammar of both Hasidic and non-Hasidic speakers of the relevant Yiddish dialects at that stage. We conclude the paper by identifying some of the language-internal, sociolinguistic and historical factors that have contributed to such rapid and pervasive language change, and compare the developments in Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish to those of minority German dialects in North America.
