Complete loss of case and gender within two generations: evidence from Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Complete loss of case and gender within two generations: evidence from Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish Zoë Belk1
· Lily Kahn2 · Kriszta Eszter Szendrői1
Received: 19 July 2018 / Accepted: 18 December 2019 / Published online: 23 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Yiddish was the everyday language spoken by most Central and East European Jews during the last millennium. As a result of the extreme loss of speakers during the Holocaust, subsequent geographic dispersal, and lack of institutional support, Yiddish is now an endangered language. Yet it continues to be a native and daily language for Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jews, who live in close-knit communities worldwide. We have conducted the first study of the linguistic characteristics of the Yiddish spoken in the community in London’s Stamford Hill. While Krogh (in: Aptroot, Aptroot et al. (eds.) Leket: Yiddish studies today, Du¨sseldorf University Press, Du¨sseldorf, pp 483–506, 2012), Assouline (in: Aptroot, Hansen (eds.) Yiddish language structures, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, pp 39– 62, 2014), and Sadock and Masor (J Jew Lang 6(1):89–110, 2018), investigating other Hasidic Yiddish-speaking communities, observe what they describe as morphological syncretism, in this paper we defend the claim that present-day Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish lacks morphological case and gender completely. We demonstrate that loss of morphological case and gender is the result of substantial language change over the course of two generations: while the case and gender system of the spoken medium was already beginning to undergo morphological syncretism and show some variation prior to World War II, case and gender distinctions were clearly present in the mental grammar of both Hasidic and nonHasidic speakers of the relevant Yiddish dialects at that stage. We conclude the paper by identifying some of the language-internal, sociolinguistic and historical factors that have contributed to such rapid and pervasive language change, and
& Zoe¨ Belk [email protected] 1
Department of Linguistics, UCL, London, UK
2
Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL, London, UK
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compare the developments in Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish to those of minority German dialects in North America. Keywords Yiddish · Hasidic Yiddish · Case · Gender · Language change · Morphological syncretism
1 Introduction 1.1 Background Yiddish was the everyday language spoken by most Central and East European Jews during the last millennium. It is a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet and containing significant Semitic (Hebrew and Aramaic) and (in the Eastern form, which comprises the basis of the modern language) Slavic lexical components and contact features. Traditionally Eastern Yiddish has three major dialect areas (Katz 1987, xxi; Jacobs 2005, 65; Weinreich 2007, 335): Northeastern (chiefly spoken in areas corresponding to present-day Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus), Mideastern or Central (chiefly spoken in areas corresponding to presentday Poland
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