“New York Hasidic Yiddish: From the Mountains to the Metropolis”
Chaya Nove
Brown University
Monday, April 28
4:00 pm
Memorial Union, Old Madison Room
800 Langdon St, Madison, WI
Zoom livestream also available – click here to register and receive the link
Sponsored by the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture
Co-sponsored by the Max Kade Institute for German American Studies
Yiddish arrived in New York in the late 19th century with Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the city soon became home to the largest concentration of Yiddish speakers globally. Speakers spanned the religious-secular spectrum and represented a geographically diverse cross-section of Eastern European society with their respective Yiddish dialects. After World War II, the language declined precipitously due to assimilation, the genocide of European Jewry, and the shift toward English among second and third-generation immigrants. Today, New York and its surrounding areas once again host the largest concentration of Yiddish speakers in the world, with the language now ranking among the five most spoken in the state. However, both the demographics and dialectal ecosystem have changed dramatically; the vast majority of speakers are now Hasidic Jews speaking a largely unified dialect referred to as Hasidic Yiddish.
This talk examines the origins and current state of Hasidic Yiddish based on three main sources. First, a description, along with a summary of postwar innovations, is given based on linguistic data from sociolinguistic interviews with contemporary speakers. These interviews reveal distinctive lexical features that have become standardized in the Hasidic speech community. Next, Holocaust survivor testimonies from the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe are analyzed to show the prewar geographical distribution of these same lexical variants, identifying Subcarpathian Ruthenia—a region historically marginal in terms of prewar Yiddish language and culture—as their likely source. Finally, historical accounts of postwar Hasidic initiatives are offered to explain the enduring impact of this marginal dialect across diverse Hasidic communities.
As more than half of the world’s languages face endangerment or extinction, this case study of successful community-driven language preservation offers valuable insights for understanding how minority languages can survive without support from state-sponsored institutions. The linguistic outcomes of such preservation efforts highlight key factors in language maintenance and change in diasporic communities.
Chaya R. Nove is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Linguistics at Brown University studying variation and change in New York Hasidic Yiddish and its prewar ancestral dialects. Previously, she held a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley where she managed the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE). Chaya earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center and has received support for her research from the Association for Jewish Studies and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
For a PDF of this poster, click here