Towards a New Understanding of Jewish Language in the Twenty-First Century (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Research Agenda for Comparative Jewish Linguistic Studies
Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present, 2018
In this chapter, we present a research agenda for the comparative linguistic study of Jewish communities. We survey past scholarship, discuss preliminaries for comparative study, propose some research questions, and offer reasons why this type of analysis is important.
Mensch, bentsh, and balagan: Variation in the American Jewish linguistic repertoire
Language & Communication, 2011
Based on a large-scale survey, this paper argues that the speech of American Jews should be analyzed not as a separate ethnolect or language variety but as English with a repertoire of distinctive linguistic features stemming from Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other sources. Jews make selective use of this repertoire as they index their identities as Jews and as certain types of Jews. Older Jews, Orthodox Jews, and non-Orthodox Jews who are highly engaged in religious life use different Hebrew and Yiddish words and grammatical constructions and different Hebrew pronunciations. Some Jews use distinctive meanings of Yiddish words, regional pronunciations of English words, or discourse styles. These trends are analyzed in relation to ethnolinguistic variation and Jewish languages.
A Comparative Linguistic Analysis of Judezmo and Yiddish
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1981
Scholars estimate that as many as thirty distinct Jewish languages have come into existence since the rise of the Jewish people in ancient times. An exhaustive inventory of languages having Jewish correlates would have to include:
Changes in the Sociolinguistic Ecology of Jewish Communities
The Changing World Language Map, 2018
Jews offer a noteworthy example of the geography of language. Beginning with the migration of Jews from ancient Palestine to other areas in the Middle East and continuing through contemporary migrations to and from the State of Israel and the Americas, Jews have dispersed throughout many parts of the world. In most of these migrations, Jews have, within a generation or two, adopted a variant of the local language, yielding such Jewish language varieties as Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Malayalam. Much of their linguistic distinctiveness has involved lexical influences from the Hebrew and Aramaic of Jews’ sacred texts, but there are also lexical and grammatical influences from former languages and other sources.We analyze Jewish communities as existing on a continuum of linguistic distinctiveness: some have spoken varieties almost identical to those of their non-Jewish neighbors, with only the addition of a few Hebrew words, and others have revealed significant differences in pronunciation and grammar. In the cases of the two best known diaspora Jewish languages, Yiddish and Ladino, Jewish communities maintained a language for several centuries following migration, enriching it with influences from the new local languages with which they were in contact. Contemporary Jews continue the age-old practice of Jewish linguistic distinctiveness, creating new language varieties like Jewish English, Jewish Swedish, and Jewish Mexican Spanish. This chapter describes the history of Jewish migrations through the lens of language, adding to our understanding of the role of migration and language contact in language ecology.
"Jewish Languages," in: The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora (Hasia R. Diner, ed.)
The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora (Hasia R. Diner, ed.), 2021
This chapter discusses the use of language varieties in the Jewish diaspora experience in the framework of sociolinguistic studies. Wherever Jews have lived and either wished to distinguish themselves from their neighbors or were encouraged or forced to distinguish themselves, they did so through clothing, food, ritual, and also through language: they have spoken and written somewhat differently from their neighbors around them. Exam ining the Jewish linguistic spectrum through theories of language continuum, distinctive ness, and repertoire allows us to recognize patterns and commonalities across time and a space. Sociocultural and sociolinguistic analysis of Jewish religiolects demonstrates a tight connection between language and religion, while also helping elucidate the ways in which Jews-as well as non-Jews-have crossed religious boundaries.
Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present
Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present, 2018
Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present Editors: Benjamin Hary and Sarah Bunin Benor In the series: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, De Gruyter Mouton (Berlin), November 2018 Since Joshua Fishman’s seminal work in the 1980s (e.g., Fishman, Joshua A., ed. 1985. Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. Leiden: Brill), there has been a good deal of research on languages in Jewish communities. This research has mostly been either structural or sociological but not both. Our volume brings together these two research traditions, offering sociological and structural descriptions of languages used in about 20 Diaspora Jewish communities, along with synthesizing descriptive and theoretical articles about the structure and sociology of languages in these and other communities. Using the construct of the continuum of Jewish linguistic distinctiveness, we posit “Jewish languages” as a historical and contemporary phenomenon. With a few exceptions, including Yiddish in Slavic lands and Ladino/Judeo-Spanish/Judezmo in Ottoman lands, Jews have tended to speak variants of the local non-Jewish languages. The distinctiveness of these variants has ranged from minor to major, depending on the degree of Jews’ integration into the surrounding populations, their orientation toward rabbinic texts, and other factors. While much previous research on Jewish languages assumes that the phenomenon essentially ended with modernity, this volume highlights its 21st-century manifestation.
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 2020
This paper offers an examination of the various linguistic sources of the prominent Jewish grammarian of the Jewish Enlightenment – Judah Leib Ben-Zeʿev (1764-1811). It turns out that besides former Jewish grammars, he used various sources of Christian Hebraism and German linguistics of the time, to which he never explicitly referred. Thanks to his acquaintance with these sources he succeeded in expanding the scope of Jewish Hebrew grammar to a large extent. A close investigation of his grammatical descriptions reveals that in some cases, his descriptions were heavily modeled by German linguistics, while parallel presentations of those topics in Jewish or Christian Hebrew grammars seem to be more adequate. It is being suggested that the grounds for his preference of German linguistic sources lay on the common cultural attitude among Jewish scholars of the time towards the contemporary situation of Hebrew.