YIDDISH

YIDDISH. The language used by Jews of Eastern and Central Europe and their descendants, spoken for nearly a thousand years and until World War II the most widely used Jewish language of modern times, with over 11m speakers. Currently, there are about 4m speakers worldwide, mostly in North and South America, Israel, and the Soviet Union. Yiddish is a Germanic language akin to English, but with a distinctive lexical component of about 18% HEBREW–Aramaic and 16% Slavic (Czech, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian) as well as Romance elements from Old French and Old Italian. It is the only Germanic language to be written in a non-Roman alphabet: like other Jewish languages, Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, and words of Hebrew or Aramaic origin retain their original spellings, while those of Germanic or other origin are spelled according to phonetic rules. Scholars divide Yiddish historically into four phases: Earliest Yiddish from c.1000, Old Yiddish from 1250, Middle Yiddish from 1500, and Modern Yiddish from 1700. Of the two major dialect groups, Western and Eastern, only the latter survives; Western Yiddish (Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Alsace-Lorraine) went into decline after 1700. The chief dialects of Eastern Yiddish are North-Eastern (Lithuania, Latvia, Byelorussia), South-Eastern (Ukraine, Romania, eastern Galicia), and Central (Poland, Western Galicia). Standard Yiddish is closest to the North-Eastern dialect in pronunciation, and generally closest in grammar to Central Yiddish. In the US, colloquial Yiddish became heavily influenced by AmE. Many words were replaced by Americanisms, some embodying distinctly US concepts, others reflecting the everyday dominance of English. A number of American Yiddish innovations, such as allrightnik and boychik, have found their way into colloquial AmE. See DIALECT IN AMERICA, JEWISH ENGLISH.