ABSTRACT
Jews began to move into Germanic-speaking areas of Central Europe in the first millennium of the Common Era, at which point they adopted local German dialects. Yiddish declined in Western and Central Europe in the 18th century, as local Jews abandoned Yiddish in favour of non-Jewish languages like German and Dutch, and it more or less died out in the 19th century. Many Maskilim saw Yiddish as a corrupt form of German, which served to alienate Jews from mainstream society. Yiddish was also seen as a corrupting force within Jewish religious learning, taking the rightful place of Hebrew. The long history that Jews have had speaking German has made an impact on the German language itself. Non-Jewish Germans borrowed many words from Hebrew during the many centuries of contact they had with their Jewish neighbours. Jews in other Germanic-language countries have had linguistic histories similar to the Jews of Germany.
