Yiddish

Of all the Germanic languages, Yiddish looks least Germanic: it uses a Hebrew alphabet and is read from right to left, and its grammar and lexicon have undergone considerable influence not only from Hebrew and Aramaic (HA), but also from various Slavic languages. Today Yiddish exists as an international minority language of an older generation of Jews whose sons and daughters have largely assimilated themselves to English, Hebrew, Russian, French or whatever other language is spoken by the co-territorial majority, as well as of Orthodox Jewish communities that decide against assimiliation and keep Yiddish as a part of their identity. Both groups have their origin in the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the western parts of the former Soviet Union. The drastic decline of the Yiddish speech community is due to a combination of the Nazi genocide, assimilation, and massive migration, caused by persecution, poverty or Zionism. That East European Jews spoke a Germanic language, amidst speakers of Slavic and Baltic, was again due to assimilation and migration, for their forebears had come from Germany (from the twelfth century onwards), where they had created Yiddish from Middle High German – in particular from the Southeast dialects – and a Semitic, primarily Hebrew, substratum and adstratum. East European Yiddish developed more in isolation from High German than the Yiddish of the Jews that had stayed in German lands and it was further influenced by co-territorial Slavic languages. This led to the emergence of two dialect groups, Western Yiddish (WYid.) and Eastern Yiddish (EYid.). From the end of the eighteenth century most Jews in the West began assimilating to their German linguistic environment and Western Yiddish has now virtually died out. Modern Yiddish, therefore, is Eastern Yiddish, even though it may now be spoken in the West again.