Yiddish language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
Yiddish
ייִדיש yidish 
Pronunciation: IPA: /ˈjidiʃ/
Spoken in: United States, Lithuania, Russia, Israel, Ukraine, Germany, Belarus, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere.
Total speakers: 1930s: 11-13 million (Jacobs 2005)

Today: 3 million (Source: [1] )
Language family: Indo-European
 Germanic
  West Germanic
   High German
    Yiddish 
Writing system: uses a Hebrew-based alphabet 
Official status
Official language of: Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia; legally recognized minority language in Sweden and Moldova
Regulated by: no formal bodies;
YIVO de facto
Language codes
ISO 639-1: yi
ISO 639-2: yid
ISO/FDIS 639-3: variously:
yid — Yiddish (generic)
ydd — Eastern Yiddish
yih — Western Yiddish
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

Yiddish (Yid. ייִדיש, yidish, = n. & adj. "Jewish") is a nonterritorial Germanic language, spoken throughout the world and written with the Hebrew alphabet. It originated in the Ashkenazi culture that developed from about the 10th century in central and eastern Europe, and spread via emigration to other continents. In the earliest surviving references to it, the language is called לשון־אַשכּנז (loshn-ashkenaz = n. "language of the Ashkenazi") and טײַטש (taytsh, a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for the language otherwise spoken in the region, now called Middle High German; compare the modern Deutsch). In common usage, the language is called מאַמע־לשון (mame-loshn = n. "mother tongue"), distinguishing it from biblical Hebrew and Aramaic which are collectively termed לשון־קודש (loshn-koydesh = n. "holy tongue"). The term Yiddish did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature of the language until the 18th century, but for a significant portion of its history it was the primary spoken language of the Ashkenazi Jews. The Yiddish that is a live language today, Eastern Yiddish, has a significant Slavic component to its vocabulary, unlike the virtually extinct Western Yiddish.

The general history and status of the Yiddish language are discussed below, with further detail provided in a series of separate articles on:

The word yidish means Jewish both as a noun and as an adjective. Anglophone members of the Ashkenazi community also use the words Yiddish and Jewish synonymously, in both senses. The two terms thus interchangeably designate not only the language, but also other attributes of Ashkenazi culture. (For example, in general English language discussion of Yiddish culture reference is frequently made to such things as Yiddish cooking and Yiddish music.)

Contents

[edit] Origins

The Ashkenazi culture that was taking root in 10th-century Central Europe derived its name from Ashkenaz, the medieval Hebrew name for Germany (Genesis 10:3). Its geographic extent did not coincide with the German Christian principalities, and Ashkenaz included Northern France. It also bordered on the area inhabited by the Sephardi, or Spanish Jews, which ranged into southern France. Later, the Ashkenazi territory would spread into Eastern Europe as well.

Nothing is known about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. It is generally accepted that it was likely to have contained elements from other languages of the Near East and Europe absorbed through dispersion. Since many settlers came via northern France, it is also likely that the Romance-based Jewish language of that region was represented. Traces of this remain in the modern Yiddish vocabulary, particularly in Western Yiddish; for example, בענטשן (bentshn, to say a blessing said after dining), from the Latin benedicere, and the Western Yiddish orn (to pray), from the Latin orare.

The first language of European Jews may also have been Aramaic (Katz 2004), the vernacular of the Jews in Roman era Palestine, and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia. The widespread use of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic among Jews engaged in trade.

Members of the young Ashkenazi community would have encountered the myriad dialects from which standard German was destined to emerge many centuries later. They would soon have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into the region. These dialects would have adapted to the needs of the burgeoning Ashkenazi culture and may, as characterizes many such developments, have included the deliberate cultivation of linguistic differences to assert cultural autonomy. The Ashkenazi community also had its own geography, with a pattern of relationships among settlements that was somewhat independent of its non-Jewish neighbors. This led to the consolidation of Yiddish dialects, the borders of which did not coincide with the borders of German dialects.

The further development of the Eastern Yiddish dialects involved the absorption of many words from Slavic languages.

[edit] Written evidence

The oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish is a blessing in a Hebrew prayer book from 1272 (described extensively in Frakes 2004 and Baumgarten/Frakes 2005):

Yiddish

גוּט טַק אִים בְּטַגְֿא שְ וַיר דִּיש מַחֲזֹור אִין בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ טְרַגְֿא
Transliterated gut tak im betage se vaer dis makhazor in beis hakneses terage
Translated may a good day come to him who carries this prayer book into the synagogue.

This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded in a purely Hebrew text (a reproduction of which is in Katz 2004). Nonetheless, it indicates that the Yiddish of that day was a more or less regular Middle High German into which Hebrew words — makhazor (prayer book for the High Holy Days) and beis hakneses (synagogue) — had been included.

In the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and also macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to appear. These were collected in the late 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf. During the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of the Jewish community adapting its own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic poem of this sort is the Dukus Horant which survives in the famous Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. This 14th-century manuscript was discovered in the genisa of a Cairo synagogue in 1896, and also contains a collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah.

Apart from the obvious use of Hebrew words for specifically Jewish artifacts, it is very difficult to decide how far 15th century written Yiddish differed from the German of that period. A lot depends on the interpretation of the phonetic properties of Hebrew characters, especially the vowels. There is a rough consensus that by this period, Yiddish would have sounded distinctive to the average German even when no Hebrew lexemes were used.

[edit] Printing

The advent of the printing press resulted in an increase in the amount of material produced and surviving from the 16th century and onwards. One particularly popular work was Elia Levita's Bovo-Bukh, composed 1507–1508 and printed in at least forty editions beginning in 1541. Levita, the earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written Pariz un Viene (Paris and Vienna). Another Yiddish retelling of a chivalric romance, Vidvilt (often referred to as "Widuwilt" by Germanizing scholars), presumably also dates from the 15th century, although the manuscripts are from the 16th. It is also known as Kinig Artus Hof, an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Gravenberg. Another significant writer is Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei who published a paraphrase on the Book of Job in 1557.

Women in the Ashkenazi community were traditionally not literate in Hebrew, but did read and write Yiddish. A body of literature therefore developed for which women were a primary audience. This included secular works such as the Bovo-Bukh and religious writing specifically for women, such as the Tseno-Ureno and the Tkhines. One of the best known early woman authors was Glückel of Hameln, whose memoirs are still in print.

A page from Elia Levita's Yiddish-Hebrew-Latin-German dictionary
Enlarge
A page from Elia Levita's Yiddish-Hebrew-Latin-German dictionary

The segmentation of the Yiddish readership, between women who read mame-loshn but not loshn-koydesh, and men who read both, was significant enough that distinctive typefaces were used for each. The name commonly given to the semicursive form used exclusively for Yiddish was װײַבערטײַטש (vaybertaytsh = "womens taytsh"; shown in the heading and fourth column in the adjacent illustration), with square Hebrew letters (shown in the third column) being reserved for text in that language and Aramaic. This distinction was retained in general typographic practice through to the early 19th century, with Yiddish books being set in vaybertaytsh (also termed מאַשײט Masheyt). An additional distinctive semicursive typeface was, and still is, used in Yiddish press for rabbinical commentary on religious texts when both appear on the same page. This is commonly termed Rashi from the name of the most renowned early author of such material. (Rashi is also the typeface normally used when the Sefardi counterpart to Yiddish, Ladino, is printed in Hebrew script.)

[edit] Secularization

The Western Yiddish dialect began to decline in the 18th century, as The Enlightenment and the Haskalah led to the German view that Yiddish was a corrupt form of their language. Between assimilation to German and the incipient creation of Modern Hebrew, Western Yiddish only survived as a language of "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups" (Liptzin 1972). Farther east, where Jews were denied such emancipation, Yiddish was the cohesive force in a secular culture based on, and termed, ייִדישקײט (yidishkayt = "Jewishness").

The late 19th century and early 20th century are widely considered the Golden Age of secular Yiddish literature. This coincides with the development of Modern Hebrew as a spoken and literary language, from which some words were also absorbed into Yiddish. The three authors generally regarded as the founders of the modern Yiddish literary genre were born in the 19th century, but their work and significance continued to grow into the 20th. The first was Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim. The second was Sholem Yakov Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholom Aleichem, whose stories about טבֿיה דער מילכיקער (tevye der milkhiker = Tevye the Dairyman) inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. The third was Isaac Leib Peretz.

[edit] The 20th century

At the start of the 20th century, Yiddish was emerging as a major Eastern European language. Its rich literature was ever more widely published, Yiddish theater and Yiddish film were booming, and it had even achieved status as one of the official languages of the Belorussian SSR. Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries (notably Poland) after World War I led to an increase in formal Yiddish-language education, more uniform orthography, and to the 1925 founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, later YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Yiddish emerged as the national language of a large Jewish community in Eastern Europe that rejected Zionism and sought to obtain Jewish cultural autonomy in Europe. It also contended with Modern Hebrew as a literary language among Zionists.

On the eve of World War II, there were between 11 and 13 million Yiddish speakers (Jacobs 2005). The Holocaust, however, led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use of Yiddish, as the extensive Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day life were largely destroyed. Although millions of Yiddish speakers survived the war (including nearly all Yiddish speakers in the Americas), further assimilation in countries such as the United States, Soviet Union and the strictly monolingual stance of the Zionist ideology led to a decline in the use of Eastern Yiddish similar to the earlier decline in Western Yiddish. Nevertheless, the number of speakers within the widely spread Orthodox (mainly Hasidic) communities has lately been steadily on the rise. Although used in various countries, Yiddish has attained an official status of a minority language only in Moldova and Sweden.

Reports of the number of current Yiddish speakers vary significantly. Ethnologue estimates that in 2005 there were 3 million speakers of Eastern Yiddish,[1] of which over one third lived in the United States. In contrast, the Modern Language Association reports fewer than 200,000 in the United States.[2] Western Yiddish, which had "several tens of thousands of speakers" on the eve of the Holocaust, is reported by Ethnologue to have had an "ethnic population" of slighty below 50,000 in 2000 [3]. Intermediate estimates are also given, for example, of a worldwide Yiddish-speaking population of about 2 million in 1996 in a report by the Council of Europe.[4] Further demographic information about the recent status of what is treated as an Eastern-Western dialect continuum is provided in the YIVO Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ).

There have been frequent episodes of debate about the extent of the linguistic independence of Yiddish from the languages that it absorbed. Some commentary dismisses Yiddish as a mere jargon, although precisely that term, in Yiddish, is also used as a colloquial designation for the language, but without pejorative connotation. There have been periodic assertions that it is a German dialect and, even when recognized as an autonomous language, it has sometimes been referred to as Judeo-German. A widely cited statement of the situation in the 1930s was published by Max Weinreich, quoting a remark by an auditor of one of his lectures: אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט (a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot). "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" facsimile excerpt at [1]; discussed in detail in a separate article).

[edit] Israel

This article or section does not cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations. (help, get involved!) This article has been tagged since August 2006.

[citations needed] The national language of Israel is Modern Hebrew. The rejection of Yiddish as an alternative reflected the conflict between religious and secular forces. Many in the larger, secular group wanted a new national language to foster a cohesive identity, while traditionally religious Jews desired that Hebrew be respected as a holy language reserved for prayer and religious study. In the early twentieth century, Zionist immigrants in Palestine tried to eradicate the use of Yiddish amongst their own population, and make its use socially unacceptable.

This conflict also reflected the opposing views among secular Jews worldwide, one side seeing Hebrew (and Zionism) and the other Yiddish (and Internationalism) as the means of defining emerging Jewish nationalism. Finally, the large post-1948 influx of Jewish refugees from Arab countries (to whom Yiddish was entirely foreign, but who already spoke a Semitic language in daily life) effectively made Hebrew the only practical option. But even though this social factor would have anyway doomed any chance for Yiddish to prosper, state authorities in the young Israel of the 1950s went to the extent of using censorship laws inherited from British rule in order to prohibit or extremely limit Yiddish theater in Israel.[citation needed]

Many of the older immigrants to Israel from the former USSR (usually those above 50 years of age) speak or understand some Yiddish.

In religious circles, it is the Ashkenazi haredi Jews, particularly the hasidic Jews and the mitnagdim of the Lithuanian yeshiva world, who continue to teach, speak and use Yiddish, making it a language used regularly by hundreds of thousands of haredi Jews today. The largest of these centers are in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem.

There is a growing revival of interest in Yiddish culture among secular Israelis, with Yiddish theater now flourishing (usually with simultaneous translation to Hebrew and Russian) and young people are taking university courses in Yiddish, some achieving considerable fluency (albeit with an accent that would seem very strange to native speakers).[citation needed]

[edit] Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union during the 1920s, Yiddish was promoted as the language of the Jewish proletariat. It was one of the official languages of the Byelorussian SSR, as well as several agricultural districts of the Ukrainian SSR. A public educational system entirely based on the Yiddish language was established and comprised kindergartens, schools, and higher educational institutions (technical schools, rabfaks and other university departments). A Jewish Autonomous Oblast was even formed in the Far East with Yiddish as its official language, with the expectations that Soviet Jews would move there. At the same time, Hebrew was considered a bourgeois language and its use was generally discouraged. The vast majority of the Yiddish-language cultural institutions were closed in the late 1930s along with cultural institutions of other ethnic minorities lacking administrative entities of their own. After the Second World War, growing anti-Semitic tendencies in Soviet politics drove Yiddish from most spheres; the last Yiddish-language schools, theaters and publications were closed by the end of 1940s. Yet it continued to be widely used as a spoken medium for decades in the areas with compact Jewish population (primarily in Moldavia, Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Belorussia).

In the former Soviet states, presently active Yiddish authors include Yoysef Burg (Chernivtsi, b. 1912), Zisye Veytsman (Samara, b. 1951), and Aleksandr Abramovic Bejderman (see German-language Wikipedia article) (Odessa, b. 1949). Yiddish language radio programs are produced in Chernivtsi and Chişinău. Publication of an earlier Yiddish periodical was resumed in 2004 with the annual דער נײַער פֿרײַנד (der nayer fraynd, St. Petersburg). Two newspapers include Yiddish sections, דער ביראָבידזשאנער שטערן (der birobidzhaner shtern, Birobidzhan) and אונדזער קול (undzer kol, Chişinău).

[edit] Sweden

In June 1999, the Swedish Parliament enacted legislation giving Yiddish legal status [5] as one of the country's official minority languages (entering into effect in April 2000). The rights thereby conferred are not detailed, but additional legislation was enacted in June 2006 establishing a new governmental agency, The Swedish National Language Council, the mandate of which instructs it to, "collect, preserve, scientifically research, and spread material about the national minority languages", naming them all explicitly, including Yiddish. When announcing this action, the government made an additional statement about "simultaneously commencing completely new initiatives for … Yiddish [and the other minority languages]".

The Swedish government publishes documents in Yiddish, of which the most recent details the the national action plan for human rights [6]. An earlier one provides general information about national minority language policies. [7]

[edit] United States

In the United States, the Yiddish language bonded Jews from many countries. פארווערטס (forverts - The Forward) was one of seven Yiddish daily newspapers in New York City, and other Yiddish newspapers served as a forum for Jews of all European backgrounds. The Yiddish Forward still appears weekly and is available in an online edition.[8]. It remains in wide distribution, together with דער אלגעמיינער זשורנאל (der algemeyner zhurnal - Algemeiner Journal) which is also published weekly and appears online. [9] The widest-circulation Yiddish newspaper is probably דער איד (der yid).[2] Several additional newspapers and magazines are in regular production.

Interest in klezmer music provided another bonding mechanism. Thriving Yiddish theater in New York City and (to a lesser extent) elsewhere kept the language vital. Many "Yiddishisms," like "Italianisms" and "Spanishisms," continued to enter spoken New York English, often used by Jews and non-Jews alike unaware of the linguistic origin of the phrases (described extensively by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish). However, mother-tongue Yiddish speakers tended not to pass the language on to their children, who assimilated and spoke English.

In 1978, the Polish-born Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer, a resident of the United States, received the Nobel Prize in literature.

According to the 2000 census, almost 180,000 people in the United States speak Yiddish at home. Nearly three-quarters of these live in New York State or Florida.[3]

Most of the Jewish immigrants to the New York metropolitan area during the years of the Golden Door and Ellis Island considered Yiddish to be their native language. For example, Isaac Asimov states in his autobiography, In Memory Yet Green, that Yiddish was his first and sole spoken language and remained so for about two years after he emigrated to the United States as a small child. By contrast, Asimov's younger siblings, born in the United States, never developed any degree of fluency in Yiddish.

[edit] Religious communities

The major exception to the decline of spoken Yiddish can be found in Haredi communities all over the world. In some of the more closely-knit such communities Yiddish is spoken as a home and schooling language, especially in Hasidic communities such as Brooklyn's Borough Park, Williamsburg and Crown Heights, and in Monsey, Kiryas Joel, and New Square. (Over 88% of the population of Kiryas Joel is reported to speak Yiddish at home. [10]) Yiddish is also widely spoken in the Antwerp Jewish community and in smaller Haredi communities such as the ones in London, Manchester and Montreal. Among most Haredim, Hebrew is generally reserved for prayer, while Yiddish is used for religious studies as well as a home and business language. In Israel, however, Haredim commonly speak Modern Hebrew, with the notable exception of many Hasidic communities. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Haredim who use Modern Hebrew also understand Yiddish. Many send their children to schools in which the primary langauge of instruction is Yiddish. Members of movements such as Satmar Hasidism, which views the commonplace use of Hebrew as a form of Zionism, use Yiddish almost exclusively.

Hundreds of thousands of young children have been, and are still, taught to translate the texts of the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy into Yiddish. This process is called טיַיטשן (taytshn) — "translating" . Most Ashkenazi yeshivas' highest level lectures in Talmud and Halakha are delivered in Yiddish by the rosh yeshivas as well as ethical talks of mussar. Hasidic rebbes generally use only Yiddish to converse with their followers and to deliver their various Torah talks, classes, and lectures. The linguistic style and vocabulary of Yiddish have influenced the manner in which many Orthodox Jews who attend yeshivas speak English. This usage is distinctive enough that it has been dubbed "Yeshivish".

While Hebrew remains the language of Jewish prayer, the Hasidim have mixed considerable Yiddish into their Hebrew, and are also responsible for a significant secondary religious literature written in Yiddish. For example, the tales about the Baal Shem Tov were written largely in Yiddish.

[edit] See also

[edit] Bibliography

  • Baumgarten, Jean (transl. and ed. Jerold C. Frakes), Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, ISBN 0-19-927633-1.
  • Birnbaum, Solomon, Yiddish - A Survey and a Grammar, Toronto, 1979
  • Fishman, David E., The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2005, ISBN 0-8229-4272-0.
  • Fishman, Joshua A. (ed.), Never Say Die: A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, 1981, ISBN 90-279-7978-2 (in Yiddish and English).
  • Frakes, Jerold C., Early Yiddish Texts 1100-1750, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, ISBN 0-19-926614-X.
  • Herzog, Marvin, et.al. ed., YIVO, The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, 3 vols., Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen, 1992-2000, ISBN 3-484-73013-7.
  • Jacobs, Neil G. Yiddish: a Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, ISBN 0-521-77215-X.
  • Katz, Dovid, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, Basic Books, New York, 2004, ISBN 0-465-03728-3.
  • Kriwaczek, Paul, Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2005, ISBN 0-297-82941-6.
  • Lansky, Aaron, Outwitting History: How a Young Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a Vanishing Civilisation, Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 2004, ISBN 1-56512-429-4.
  • Liptzin, Sol, A History of Yiddish Literature, Jonathan David Publishers, Middle Village, NY, 1972, ISBN 0-8246-0124-6.
  • Shandler, Jeffrey, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006, ISBN 0-520-24416-8.
  • Weinreich, Uriel. College Yiddish: an Introduction to the Yiddish language and to Jewish Life and Culture, 6th revised ed., YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, 1999, ISBN 0-914512-26-9 (in Yiddish and English).
  • Weinstein, Miriam, Yiddish: A Nation of Words, Ballantine Books, New York, 2001, ISBN 0-345-44730-1.
  • Wex, Michael, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, St. Martin's Press, New York, 2005, ISBN 0-312-30741-1.
  • Wexler, Paul, Two-Tiered Relexification in Yiddish: Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian Dialect, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 2002, ISBN 3-11-017258-5.
  • [Katz, Hirshe-Dovid] 1992. Code of Yiddish spelling ratified in 1992 by the programmes in Yiddish language and literature at Bar Ilan University, Oxford University Tel Aviv University, Vilnius University. Oxford: Oksforder Yidish Press in cooperation with the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. (כלל–תקנות פון יידישן אויסלייג. 1992. אקספארד: אקספארדער צענתער פאר העכערע העברעאישע שתודיעס) ISBN 1-897744-01-3

[edit] Periodicals

[edit] Audio resources

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Yiddish, Eastern, on Ethnologue. Accessed online 17 October 2006.
  2. ^ Most spoken languages in the entire US, Modern Language Association. Accessed online 17 October 2006.
  3. ^ Yiddish, Western, on Ethnologue. Accessed online 17 October 2006.
  4. ^ Emanuelis Zingeris, Yiddish culture, Council of Europe Committee on Culture and Education Doc. 7489, 12 February 1996. Accessed online 17 October 2006.
  5. ^ (Swedish) Regeringens proposition 1998/99:143 Nationella minoriteter i Sverige, 10 June 1999. Accessed online 17 October 2006.
  6. ^ (Yiddish) אַ נאַציאָנאַלער האַנדלונגס־פּלאַן פאַר די מענטשלעכע רעכט A National Action Plan for Human Rights 2006-2009. Accessed online 4 December 2006.
  7. ^ (Yiddish) נאַציאַנאַלע מינאָריטעטן און מינאָריטעט־שפּראַכן National Minorities and Minority Languages. Accessed online 4 December 2006.
  8. ^ (Yiddish) פארווערטס: The Forward online.
  9. ^ (Yiddish) דער אלגעמיינער זשורנאל: Algemeiner Journal online
  10. ^ MLA Data Center Results: Kiryas Joel, New York, Modern Language Association. Accessed online 17 October 2006.

[edit] External links

Wikipedia
Yiddish language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikibooks
Wikibooks has a book on the topic of
Major Modern Germanic languages
Afrikaans | Danish | Dutch | English | German | Norwegian | Swedish | Yiddish
Minor Modern Germanic languages
Faroese | Frisian | Icelandic | Luxembourgish
Reg. acknowledged Germanic languages/dialects
Low German / Low Saxon | Limburgish | Scots



  Jewish Languages [edit]  
Afro-Asiatic
Hebrew eras: Biblical | Mishnaic | Medieval | Modern
dialects: Ashkenazi | Sephardi | Yemenite | Sanaani | Tiberian | Mizrahi | Samaritan Hebrew
Judeo-Aramaic (Aramaic): Biblical | Barzani | Hulaulá | Lishana Deni | Lishán Didán | Lishanid Noshan | Targum | Samaritan Aramaic
Judeo-Arabic (Arabic): Judeo-Iraqi | Judeo-Moroccan | Judeo-Yemenite | Judeo-Libyan | Judeo-Algerian
Other: Cushitic: Kayla | Qwara Berber: Judeo-Berber
Indo-European
Yiddish (Germanic) dialects: Eastern | Western | Litvish | Poylish | Ukrainish | Klezmer-loshn
derivates: Yeshivish | Yinglish
institutions: YIVO | Yiddish Theater | National Yiddish Book Center
Judeo-Romance (Romance): Catalanic | Judeo-Italian | Ladino | Haketia | Tetuani | La‘az | Shuadit | Zarphatic | Lusitanic | Judeo-Aragonese
Judeo-Persian (Aryan): Bukhori | Juhuri | Dzhidi | Judeo-Hamedani | Judeo-Shirazi | Judeo-Esfahani | Judeo-Kurdish | Judeo-Yazdi
Judeo-Kermani | Judeo-Kashani | Judeo-Borujerdi | Judeo-Khunsari | Judeo-Golpaygani | Judeo-Nehevandi
Other: Yevanic (Hellenic) | Knaanic (Slavic) | Judæo-Marathi (Indic)
Turkic Dravidian Kartvelian
Krymchak | Karaim Judeo-Malayalam Gruzinic
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../y/i/d/Yiddish_language.html"