Yeshivish (Yiddish: ישיבֿיש), refers to a sociolect of English spoken by yeshiva students and other Jews with a strong connection to the Orthodox yeshiva world.
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Only a few serious studies have been written about Yeshivish. The first is a master's thesis by Steven Ray Goldfarb (University of Texas at El Paso, 1979) called "A Sampling of Lexical Items in Yeshiva English." The work lists, defines, and provides examples for nearly 250 Yeshivish words and phrases. The second, more comprehensive work is Frumspeak: The First Dictionary of Yeshivish by Chaim Weiser. Weiser maintains that Yeshivish is not a pidgin, creole, or an independent language, nor is it precisely a jargon. He refers to it instead, with tongue-in-cheek, as a shprach, a Yiddish word meaning "language" or "rapport."
Linguist and Yiddishist Dovid Katz describes it in "Words on Fire: the Unfinished Story of Yiddish" as a "new dialect of English," which is "taking over as the vernacular in everyday life in some ... circles in America and elsewhere."[1]
The English variant of Yeshivish consists of grammatical irregularities borrowed from Yiddish, and a vocabulary consisting of Yiddish, Rabbinic Hebrew, Talmudic Aramaic, and sometimes Modern Hebrew. The speaker will use those terms in the stead of their English counterpart, either because of cultural affinity, or lack of the appropriate English term.
The Yiddish variant of Yeshivish is questionable as a definition in itself, since the grammar remains identical to that of Yiddish. It may be argued that the Yiddish variant of Yeshivish is a new phenomenon, and consists of less Germanic terms and more Aramaic and Rabbinical Hebrew.
Yiddish as portrayed in academia concentrates on the secular and cultural variants of Yiddish, and may be attributed to the fact that YIVO, the forerunner of Yiddish as an academic study, was founded by Secular Jews who themselves were unlikely to be educated in Yeshivas and also removed by one or more generations from Yeshiva-educated speakers (see Yiddishisten),
However, the "Yeshivish" dialect of Yiddish has existed for quite a few centuries among Yeshiva-educated Jews in Eastern and Central Europe. However, as a result of the Holocaust, World War II and immigration, the secular-speaking Yiddish community is very small, and is far outnumbered by Religious Yiddish-Speaking communities in New York, Antwerp, Jerusalem, B'nei Beraq and others, making the predominant contemporary Yiddish Dialect that of the Yeshivish variant.
The Yeshivish dialect of Hebrew consists of occasional Ashkenazic pronunciation and various Yiddishisms within Modern Hebrew spoken among Haredi communities in Israel. While many terms from the Talmud and Mishna exist in Modern Hebrew, their pronunciation is in line with Modern Hebrew, whereas in the Yeshivish Variant, they maintain their Ashkenazic variant.
Although there may also be Yiddishisms present in Yeshivish Hebrew, these are not distinct to the Yeshivish Dialect and can be found in mainstream Modern Hebrew as well.
Yeshivish is primarily a male spoken dialect.[2] Fathers and sons might speak Yeshivish, particularly of teenage years and above, while mothers and daughters generally do not, or they speak a milder variety of it.
Some observers predict that the English variant of Yeshivish may develop further to the point that it could become one of the historical Judeo-hybrid languages like Yiddish, Ladino or Judeo-Arabic. The Judeo-hybrid languages were spoken dialects which mixed elements of the local vernacular, Hebrew, Aramaic and Jewish religious idioms. As Yiddish was to Middle High German, Yeshivish may be to Standard American English. However, the integration of modern-day Jews with non-Jews may keep their speech from diverging as far from the standard language as it did in the past.
The vocabulary and grammatical structure of Yeshivish is drawn primarily from the speaker's native language (see above), although it includes scholarly jargon, primarily from the Talmud and Acharonim in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic. In many sentences however, the grammatical and lexical features of the speaker's native language is slight and sometimes even lacking altogether.
A distinguishing feature of Yeshivish is that its speakers knowingly apply highly technical and literal written language to a colloquial language and in common day usage, similar to Modern Hebrew, for example:
He caused a lot of nezek, but l'basoif was moideh b'miktzas and claimed he was shoigeg
Nezek in its original context refers to the Talmudic notion of tort law, l'basoif means "eventually", moideh b'miktzas refers to partial confession of a defendant, and shoigeg in its original context means an incident which was caused unwillingly, but was a result of partial negligence.
Despite its heavy borrowing of technical and legal terms, the above sentence would be understood clearly by speakers of Yeshivish as "He did a lot of damage, and eventually admitted that he did it, although he claimed it was inadvertent."
Note in the above example that shoigeg does not have the same meaning in Yeshivish as it does in its original context, wherein it implies negligence. oines would be the correct technical term, but it may be argued that there is less preference for oines in Yeshivish due to its meaning in Modern Hebrew of rape.
The Yeshivish accent has similarities to various accents of Eastern European and New York backgrounds. One notable feature of Yeshivish is the frequency of occurrence of the phoneme [x], common in many words of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish origin.
/t/ may be released when in general American it would be flapped or unreleased. Final stops may devoice and pre-nasal /æ/ may not raise.
Yeshivish may use a "chanting intonation" for reading and discussing Jewish texts. A number of other distinctive intonations are also used: for instance, a high-falling pitch boundary for a dramatic point.
A hesitation click is used, borrowed from Israeli Hebrew:
Yeshivish has some unique interjections. For instance Oh! and Psshhhh! may be used as praise markers.
Loan words are often given plurals using standard English morphology. For instance, the plural of yeshiva is yeshivas rather than yeshivois as in Ashkenazi Hebrew (although this is similar to the plural form in Yiddish). Hebrew nouns ending in -us are pluralized with the suffix -in rather than replacing -us with -uyois as in Ashkenazi Hebrew, e.g. shlichus > shlichusin 'mission' and mashmaus > mashmausin 'implication'. This likely comes from the Yiddish plural marker -n although it could also have derived from Aramaic -in.
Loan verbs may also conjugate with standard English patterns. For example, Yiddish derived daven 'pray' may become davening or davened, e.g. "I already davened mincha." and "Quiet, I'm davening."
Some verbs, particularly those of Hebrew origin, are often treated as participles, and inflected by English auxiliary verbs, in the same way that periphrastic verbs are constructed in Yiddish. For example:
There are a number of phrasal verbs calqued from Yiddish, for instance bring down and tell over 'recount, retell (a story)'.
Modals may be used differently than in standard English, e.g. I want that you should get her number.
There are a number of differences between the use of prepositions in Yeshivish and standard English:
The preposition by has a wide array of meanings in Yeshivish:
Prepositions are often dropped:
The Yeshivish speaker frequently adopts a slight English as a foreign or second language accent. The Yeshivish accent is usually of a nondescript origin and the Yeshivish speaker frequently appears as if he has a slight struggle to find the correct English word. The Yeshivish accent has been occasionally described as Eastern European filtered through a New York accent.
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