Paul Malevitz writes from Los Angeles:
“For well over 70 years now, the standard dialect taught in Yiddish schools has been and still is the ‘northeastern’ one, similar if not always identical to that which was spoken in Vilna. (One difference is that in Vilna Yiddish, veynen can mean both ‘to reside’ and ‘to cry.’ In standard Yiddish, ‘to reside’ is voynen.)
“And yet in 2008, the number of native Yiddish speakers using the northeastern dialect is negligible. There is a small group of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, descendants of the students of the Vilna Gaon, who still speak northeastern Yiddish. Chabad Hasidim also do, although in reality, most of them today speak English in America and Hebrew in Israel.
“The vast majority of native Yiddish speakers today are Hasidim of the Satmar, Kloyzenberg, Vizhnitz and other courts, who all use the Central Polish/Southern dialect. (Whereas in standard Yiddish, for example, du geyst *is ‘you go’ and *di gayst [pronounced “DEE GEIST”] is ‘the spirit,’ the latter has both meanings for these Hasidim.) For a number of years, I was a Yiddish interpreter for the AT&T Language Line, and every single call for service that I received was for New York Hasidim, who all spoke the central Polish/Southern dialect. Since learning a ‘living language’ is for the purpose of communication, don’t you think that we need to reassess the dialect of Yiddish we teach in our universities and adult classes to conform to the current reality?”
Mr. Malevitz asks a reasonable question. Certainly, there is nothing sacrosanct about “standard Yiddish.” The northeastern or Lithuanian dialect on which it is based (which was essentially the Yiddish spoken in Belarus as well, but not in Poland, Ukraine, Romania or parts of Hungary) is no more intrinsically superior to other kinds of Yiddish than Parisian French is to other kinds of French, or upper-class London English to lower-class regional English. As is the case with all standard or “official” languages, it acquired its status for purely historical reasons.
With most languages, this happened through the agency of a ruling political class that furthered the dialect of its country’s capital. In Yiddish, however, which had neither a ruling class nor a political capital, the story was different. In the 1890s and the early 20th century, when the idea began to spread among Eastern European Jews that Yiddish was a respectable language with a history and value of its own, and not merely the spoken “jargon” that Jews had traditionally considered it, there were three great centers of Yiddish literary and cultural activity in Eastern Europe: Warsaw, in which a Polish dialect of Yiddish was spoken; Odessa, with its Ukrainian dialect, and Vilna.
Yet a fourth center was in Berlin, where large numbers of Yiddish-speaking émigrés and intellectuals lived. Although any of these could have become the capital of Yiddish linguistic studies, it was Vilna that did when, in 1925, the great Yiddishist Max Weinreich established the Yiddisher visnshaftlekher institute, or Yiddish Scientific Institute, better known as YIVO, in that city. It was YIVO, through the great influence and prestige that it came to acquire under Weinreich’s tutelage, that turned Vilna Yiddish into standard Yiddish, which it has remained in the world of Yiddish scholarship and education to this day. (YIVO itself moved with Weinreich to New York in 1940.)
Hasidism, however, had practically no presence in Lithuania, which was always a bastion of misnagdic or anti-Hasidic Judaism. Nor did the many Hasidic courts of Poland, Ukraine, the Carpathian mountains and Hungary give a hoot about a secular institution like YIVO, or about secular Yiddish culture and literature in general, to which they were and remain bitterly opposed. It is therefore one of the ironies of Jewish history that, as Mr. Malevitz observes, Yiddish has been kept alive as a language transmitted to children from parents only by Hasidim, although not by all of them.
And yet how many American Jews studying Yiddish today are doing so in order to communicate with ultra-Orthodox Hasidim (who, in any case, especially the American-born among them, tend to be perfectly fluent in English)? My guess would be very few. A far greater number are interested in precisely the secular “Yiddishkeit” that the Hasidim reject: a taste of the language or even enough of it to converse with one another in Yiddish clubs, an ability to sing or listen with comprehension to Yiddish songs and to watch Yiddish plays and films, and, for the more ambitious, a command of written Yiddish for the purpose of reading Yiddish literature in the original or engaging in linguistic and historical research.
And if that is your goal, Lithuanian Yiddish is as good a medium as any. It is the Yiddish in which a great deal of Yiddish culture was created, and it is certainly no further removed from most Polish and Ukrainian Yiddish than is the Hungarian Yiddish of many Hasidim. Moreover, once you have learned one dialect of a language, a little effort will enable you to get along in the others. You don’t have to sound like a Satmar Hasid to understand or be understood by him in Yiddish. He’ll be no less happy to talk mameloshn with you if you speak the dialect of Vilna. As accurate as Mr. Malevitz’s description of things may be, there’s no need to revamp an entire educational approach system just to go to di gayst from du geyst.
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Here's a side question: Yiddish —like other languages— is spoken in dialects with different pronunciations and grammatical quirks. In the past, there was no standardized spelling of Yiddish, and each writer phonetically transcribed his own dialect, or even idiolect. Has YIVO Standard become the standardized spelling for Yiddish, or do modern, literate Yiddish speakers write in different dialects? In other words, would what is du geyst and di gayst in YIVO Standard be spelled identically by a speaker of the Central Polish/Southern dialect?
While there is a standard spelling system (YIVO-based, I believe), I have seen spelling that is closer to the spoken Hasidic Yiddish than to the "correct" spelling that I was taught. As an aside, there is also the influx of English words into American Hasidic Yiddish that does not have its counterpart in Israel, and caused serious amusement to a Belzer hasid I know because, to him, it simply wasn't Yiddish.
I think the more important things is to know the YIVO based spelling system than anything else. With YIVO you can use the transliterated dictionaries online and teach yourself Yiddish. There is very little difference in dialects and with a good knowledge of the language all three dialects are comprehensible. Hre is a good website you might want to look at if you are studing Yiddish. There are Yiddish lessons in Spanish, French, and German, and a lot of good Yiddish music, Seidenfeld in Yiddish, and more. www.myoyvey.com
You forget that there is a thriving Yiddish press in the Hasidic community which is not about past literature but about present living. Yiddish is spoken in the Hasidic community's stores and other institutions. There it is still a live language, not a relic to be studied or tried out in clubs.
where can you take yiddish lessons? are there yiddish clubs in the new york area?
First off, Debbie Dulberg should be aware that New York is the best place in America to learn Yiddish; there are many clubs there as well as academic resources for studying the language through the YIVO Institute, Workmen's Circle, and informally at other Jewish institutions (syagogues, YMHAs, etc.). I'm sure a web search or a phone call to any of the above mentioned institutions will yield fruit: it's how I started learning the language about 12 years ago! Second, I think Philologos gets it right regarding the purpose and need for a standard dialect for acquiring the language--particularly in the non-organic way that Yiddish must be acquired nowadays. One needs a standard, any standard, in order to teach the language, and the YIVO model is certainly as good as any: better than most, in fact, considering the linguistic rigor with which it was originally devised. Nonetheless, one should be aware that YIVO Yiddish isn't really all that close to Lithuanian Yiddish, regardless of YIVO's origins in Vilna (though it was formally incorporated in Berlin!). There are any number of discrepancies between what I was taught at YIVO in the 1990s and how Lithuanian speakers actually spoke: grammatically as well as phonetically. The misperception comes about because YIVO Yiddish sounds so different from Khasidic Yiddish that it gets attributed (generously) to the Lithuanian dialect. In fact, most native speakers complain that YIVO Yiddish sounds not like Lithuanian Yiddish, but too much like German! (An indication that these native speakers don't know much German...!) When I first left the YIVO summer programs, about 10 years ago, and sought out native speakers, I was surprised at how little I understood of them, regardless of their dialect. This is neither evidence of a poor education or an unmotivated student: it's a fact of studying any foreign language; if you've studied Spanish in college for four years, then travel to Mexico City or the Dominican Republic for the first time, you would be just as surprised at how different the spoken language is there from the academic model as I was on my first visit to Boro Park. But as Philologos points out, having studied the language academically, I was able to acclimate my ears fairly easily, and soon enough I was able not only to understand Yiddish speakers from all over the linguistic and cultural spectrum, but to make myself understood, as well. A different challenge is finding Khasidic Jews actually interested in conversing with a modern Jew with store-bought Yiddish, but this isn't the theme of the article, or the concerns of the YIVO system....
It is interesting to note that all of us speak of Yiddish as if it is frozen in time. There is a "Vilna dialect" and a "Polish dialect" and a "Ukrainian dialect", etc. - as if there are still Yiddish speaking communities in these places. In reality, there is a spoken Yiddish of the haredim, and there is the academic (scholarly) Yiddish of YIVO. The spoken Yiddish of the haredim is continuing its natural life as a native language, adopting new vocabulary from English in the USA or from Modern Hebrew in Israel. The YIVO Yiddish is for research (for some) or a hobby (for others), and unfortunately it is not a living language that defines the identity of a community (and its enthusiasts are people who generally raise their children in other languages). That, of course, should be the main concern of YIVO and of secular Yiddishists - how to promote Yiddish as a language that defines the Jewish experience, beyond the realm of mere academic interest. Sadly, the era of Jewish ideologies has ended, and Yiddish as merely a hobby is a type of nostalgic endeavor - hence we speak of a "Vilna dialect" that no longer has relevancy.
As far as I understand the problematics of Yiddish from the above discussion, the question is: Literary Yiddish vs. Spoken Yiddish. It has never been a simple one. One indeed needs a more specific tool for Research, Literature and professional use, therefore if Lithuanian yiddish opposes "geist" and "gaist", this is a good criterion, as long as there is an intellectual, scientific, literary establishment that needs this kind of more precise tool. The spoken varieties are another form of a Language and there are different degrees of Diglossy in any existing language. Many people think Spoken and Literary are the same language as long as an educated person would master both, but the contradictions between Standard Written and Spoken/substandard will exist as long as people continue to wear pyjamas/nightgown in their bed (those who do), sweaters when they run and smokings or a party dress when they go to a [word deleted]tail. Should there be a revival of Yiddish Literature and Culture in the years to come, Life will give us an opportunity to see if there is a real competition in this field between those Yiddisholects.
Yehuda: Names are but names. We still call Jews Jews, though only a minority live in Judah (or even Judaea) nowadays; likewise, most of the speakers of English have never seen England.
I was the Yiddish language coach for the television program Northern Exposure and I proudly gave the lead character a full Galicianer prononciation for his Yiddish bits. The Galicianer prononciation was that used in both Hassidic and intellectual circles until WWII, and can be heard still in Ger and Bobov communities, and was the "middle" pronunciation between the Lithuanian and Hungarian (there's even a joke, about whether you'd call the Shabbat food "kugel" or "keegel" so they ask a Hungarian who says "oh, that's puddink")
Yes, John Cowan, names are but names - so it's fine to call one particular accent "Vilna" and another accent "Poland". However, the point that I'm raising is that Yiddish has become merely an expression of nostalgics (and research) outside of the haredi community. It would be wonderful to hear about an "American" accent instead of talking about the "Vilna" accent, because the former would indicate that Yiddish is a successful living language of a real Jewish community (as opposed to the latter which is a reflection of a historic situation that has ended in tragedy). Indeed, I'm criticizing the lack of an ideological movement that would fight for revival of Yiddish. Everyone seems to be satisfied just with nostalgic memories of Yiddish's former importance.
I have noticed that the use of the different dialects tend to reflect the sterotypes about the Jews of the different areas. Thus, the intellectuals of YIVO used the Lithuanian dialect, while the Yiddish theater used the Romanian dialect.
The pronuciation of Standard Yiddish is based on, but is not exactly the same as, the pronunciation of the Northeastern (Lithuanian) dialect's. The grammar is based mainly on the Southeastern (Ukrainian) dialect's. Regardless of origin, the design goal was to have a unified language that would be easily understood or learnable by all Yiddish speakers, for use in education and publishing, and for other intercommunal purposes. This was consistent with the development of other new standard languages around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries: Greek, Czech, Polish, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Occitan, Shona, Inuktitut, and on and on - all of it paralleling the earlier development of standard English, French, Neolatin, Arabic, etc. It is also worth noting that few if any standard languages have completely replaced local and regional dialects in speech, but with no loss of essential utility.
In Israel, like the US, Yiddish as a primary language used in daily life, is overwhelmingly "Hasidic-Galicianer" in dialect. However, here the Lithuanian "high" intonation is not confined to academic circles or the theater. Faced with the inability to express themselves in even rudimentary Hebrew, many Russian (usually elderly) olim resort to Yiddish in their native Litvish dialect in order to communicate. Thus, on the street as a live dialect, Litvish Yiddish is, I suspect, much more common here than in the US. Time and time again, I find myself helping elderly Russian olim, at the bank or at a doctor's clinic. The gap between my Hasidic accent and their Litvish one is easily surmountable.
Marc Brukhes makes several excellent points. To illustrate his observation that YIVO Yiddish is misperceived as Litvish may I add that YIVO recognizes three grammatical genders, like Poylish but unlike Litvish. My guess is that litvak Yiddish mirrors the two gender system of the Lithuanian language. That Lithuanian has only two grammatical genders has always struck me as odd, given the language's oft-reported reputation for retaining more conservative aspects of Proto-Indo-European. John Cowan is exactly right. And in hispanophone America, few Spanish speakers —except for university Spanish majors— have seen Spain. Despite political motivations otherwise, the names of languages and dialects usually retain reference to their place of origin. It takes much more time and greater linguistic differentiation for these changes to warrant a new name. For example, one of my grandmothers spoke German-accented English. To be precise, I s'pose you could say she spoke the Illinois German English dialect, and if you wanted to be more precise, you could chase down the Brandenburger dialect she learned from her parents. In no way, however, would it be more precise, authentic, or relevant to say she spoke the Gillispie dialect of Americanish. Yasher koakh, Moyshe Hersch! I loved "Northern Exposure" and got a special kick from hearing dem mamaloshen spoken not just by Fleischman, but by other residents of Cicely. Sort of in the same vein [not vayn] as The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Speaking of which, have the Brothers Coen contacted you yet? Eli's statement about the Khasidic Yiddish press begs the question whether things have changed much since Zackary Sholem Berger's 2004 article in the FORWARD: Have Kharedi Yiddish writers produced anything comparable to the secular Yiddish literature of late 19th and early 20th centuries? Or even Di katz der payats?
My parents were a "mixed marriage," my mother being a Litvak and my father a "Rishishe." My mother used to say that listening to my father speak Yiddish was like listening to an American saying "boid" instead of "bird." I for one can barely understand the Chasidim I hear speaking Yiddish, their "Rishishe" is so broad.
My Lithuanian grandmother, born 1875 in far western Lithuania, Taurege.
She cam to America in 1913 and spoke fluent Yiddish, but was raised Catholic. She was orphaned around 9 years old and raised on a farm by a Lithuanian Catholic Family during Czarist times just before WWI.
Is this common among Non-Jews of this era to speak Yiddish?
If she were not Jewish, how would she learn so much Yiddish?
I am not Hispanic, but I picked up Spanish ( Tex-Mex) from being raised in Texas where a mixture of Spanish/English (Tex-Mex) is commonly spoken.
My Grandmother's area of Lithuania, along the Nemunas River, was rural whereas the large Jewish Populations were in cities ( Vilnius, or Wilno, was 45% pre-War.
Thnak you