Minority language maintenance and the production‐prescription interface: Number agreement in New York Yiddish

Abstract

Standardization is a focus of language maintenance efforts in many, but not all, minority language communities. What is the impact of this choice on interspeaker variation in maintained languages? This study investigates variable number agreement in Yiddish, a minority language spoken by two distinct communities in the New York area:(1) Hasidic Jews, who maintain the language without standardization, and (2) Yiddishists, who are overtly committed to maintaining a "correct" Yiddish. An analysis of data from 40 sociolinguistic interviews shows that Yiddishists have significantly higher rates of normative agreement than Hasidim do. The Yiddishists' standard language ideology has also contributed to a leveling of the differences across grammatical constructions, a predictor that is more robust among the Hasidic speakers. These community-based differences in speech reflect differences in speakers' prescriptive judgments, which were elicited through a novel postinterview text editing task.

Local features, local meanings: Language ideologies and place-linked vocalic variation among Jewish Chicagoans

“…In the United States, distinctly Jewish ways of speaking include prosodic, phonological, syntactic, and discourse features, many of which are assumed to be substrate effects of Yiddish even if their current speakers are English monolinguals (Tannen 1981;Fishman 1985; though some communities maintain Yiddish and other heritage languages, e.g. Bleaman 2018). However, not all Jewish Americans engage in all of these linguistic practices, as different combinations of features can be used to index different Jewish identities, such as affiliation with a certain denomination or sociopolitical ideology (Benor 2010(Benor , 2011.…”

Yiddish among Former Haredim

“…Secondly, the Yiddish spoken in the Haredi world is markedly different from the Yiddish spoken in the secular world, and especially that spoken by Yiddishists, most notably in its lack of morphological case and gender (see Belk, Kahn, & Szendrői 2020, but also in a large number of more and less subtle ways such as lexis, phonology, cultural references, etc. Secular Yiddishists are overtly invested in maintaining a "correct" version of the language (Bleaman 2021) and view many distinctive features of Haredi Yiddish as at odds with their preferred variety. One way of maintaining their preferred variety is for secular Yiddishists to correct the Yiddish of their interlocutors (Bleaman 2021), a practice that many former Haredim say they find alienating and, at times, offensive.…”

“…Secular Yiddishists are overtly invested in maintaining a "correct" version of the language (Bleaman 2021) and view many distinctive features of Haredi Yiddish as at odds with their preferred variety. One way of maintaining their preferred variety is for secular Yiddishists to correct the Yiddish of their interlocutors (Bleaman 2021), a practice that many former Haredim say they find alienating and, at times, offensive.…”