ABSTRACT
Yiddish is an Indo-European language belonging to the West Germanic branch of the Germanic family – it represents a development of the Middle High German dialects of the Middle Ages that also led to modern German. The language is often described technically as Judaeo-German. It differs from German mainly in its vocabulary, which contains large quantities of terms imported from Hebrew and from Slavonic, and in aspects of its grammar, which is partly innovative and partly retains characteristics of Middle High German long since lost in modern German.
