| If the Yiddish Language Dies Out, It Could Be My Fault Posted: 11 May 2010 05:58 AM PDT If the Yiddish language dies out, I’m partly to blame. That’s called Jewish Guilt. You see, my parents spoke Yiddish, but their four offspring do not. I took one year of Yiddish class during Sunday School, but just a few words stuck with me. I’m concerned about languages that are dying, but not concerned enough to spend time learning Yiddish. I do enjoy the colorful terms that come from Yiddish. In fact, lots of Yiddish words are commonly used in America. Here are just a few: - kvetch
- chutzpah
- shmooze
- maven
- klutz
- mensch
- nosh
- oy vey
- schlep
- schnook
- spiel
- tush
- zaftig
Here is some history (from Judaism 101): Yiddish was at one time the international language of Ashkenazic Jews (the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe and their descendants). A hybrid of Hebrew and medieval German, Yiddish takes about three-quarters of its vocabulary from German, but borrows words liberally from Hebrew and many other languages from the many lands where Ashkenazic Jews have lived. It has a grammatical structure all its own, and is written in an alphabet based on Hebrew characters. At its height less than a century ago, Yiddish was understood by an estimated 11 million of the world’s 18 million Jews, and many of them spoke Yiddish as their primary language. Yiddish has fallen on hard times. Today, less than a quarter of a million people in the United States speak Yiddish, about half of them in New York. Most Jews know only a smattering of Yiddish words, and most of those words are unsuitable for polite company. But in recent years, Yiddish has experienced a resurgence and is now being taught at many universities. There are even Yiddish Studies departments at Harvard, Columbia and Oxford, among others.
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