In Search of Authentic Yiddish

Abstract

Yiddish stands out as a severely endangered language which, apparently, refuses to die. This chapter will focus on new speakers of Yiddish, a non-territorial language which nonetheless has distinct cultural and ethnic associations. Data for this chapter have been collected over the course of the last few years with new Yiddish speakers in London, Brussels and Edinburgh. What is apparent are the distinct discourses of, and attitudes toward traditional and new speakers of Yiddish. When some commentators, such as Katz (2015) Beer (2009), Wex (2009) or Fishman (2001a) talk about the Yiddish of new (and here we can translate this as mostly ‘secular’) speakers, it is constructed as imperfect or faulty, being, as Fishman considers, ‘replete with Anglicisms and Germanisms’, since these speakers ‘curiously reject that which lives and is growing while they cleave to that which is admittedly wilting before their very eyes and is patently beyond their ability to revernacularize’ (Fishman 2001a: 89). As far as traditional (i.e. mainly religious) speakers are concerned however, similar features can be overlooked: ‘[i]n contrast to many other bi-and multilingual contexts, parents never corrected or complained about simultaneities in girls’ efforts to speak Yiddish’ (Fader 2009: 93). Yiddish is thus an example par excellence of a divided speech community, a term often used in minority language communities (see references to this in Chapter 2).