A thousand years of Yiddish in the European arena (original) (raw)

Honoured delegates, guests, and hosts: We are gathered here to consider the fate of a language and culture that have survived a thousand years of European history. The history of Yiddish is somewhat exotic, as European languages go, and if contemporary meanings can be read into history, then Yiddish may just have something to say about the borderless and the displaced among the minority languages of Europe, and about minority languages in general. The history of Yiddish, and the dialectology of Yiddish, have tended to ignore the political boundaries and divides within Europe. For centuries, the Yiddish territory constituted a vast "linguistic empire" in Europe, albeit as a minority language everywhere, in power nowhere. From a linguistic point of view, Yiddish was left free to develop entirely according to the external vicissitudes of history and the internal laws of historical linguistics, without the usual apparatus of normative academies and government edicts. Yiddish was and remained a folk language in Western and Central Europe. It was only in its "second home" in the Slavonic and Baltic lands of Eastern Europe that it evolved into a highly nuanced medium suitable for sophisticated literature of international status. It is that modern, Eastern European Yiddish that was exported by emigrés to the satellite Yiddish centres of London, Paris, and Berlin, to other Western European cities, and overseas, early in our own century. West to east progressions from the folksy to the sophisticated are, as, we see from Yiddish, every bit as viable as those going the other way. Let us not be the ones to predict where the greatest European creations will come from in the next hundred years.