Boils down to if Yiddish was the persons primary or secondary language. If Jewish people from 12 different countries with 8 different languages as their primary used Yiddish to communicate, it is a lingua franca. if they all spoke Yiddish at home, then the 12 different country part doesn’t matter.
I don’t know what the breakdown was, but I was under the impression for a lot of the Yiddish speaking by the 1950s, it was a combination of English first as they were not 1st generation immigrants and that many of the older immigrants actually spoke the language of their former country first and Yiddish second.
The Italian Immigrant Community had a weird problem. Italy had many dozens of dialects. Sicilian was fairly different from rest. So the older Italians would speak a mix of Italian & English to communicate with each other in NYC. Oh, and they often had some Yiddish words sneak in.
Thanks What_Exit. Surely if in the early 20th century the majority of Jews living in the US were Ashkenazim speaking Yiddish, Sephardic Jews would have been inclined to learn Yiddish if it were in their interest to do so, be it for business, social or religious reasons. And no doubt Ashkenazim Yiddish speakers would have learned Ladino for the same reasons. Surely there must have been a standard Yiddish that all Yiddish speakers coming from various backgrounds and speaking all manner of Yiddish dialects would have been able to communicate in.
My grandparents spoke Yiddish to keep the kids from knowing what was being discussed. Because of that, my mom and all her siblings spoke fluent Yiddish.
That particular example is more of an accent that an American English speaking mouth is trying to replicate. Southern Italians ( including Sicilians) have a tendency to drop the final vowel - and the best way I can describe the “C” to “G” is to say that those sounds are not the same in Italian/Sicilian as they are in American English.
But Sicilian itself is very different from standard Italian - I took Italian in high school with a bunch of native Sicilian speakers. The fact that they spoke Sicilian at home was a hindrance rather than a help to them in class, and my school Italian didn’t help me have a conversation with my Sicilian speaking relatives.
Yes. Yiddish is still spoken by New York’s Hasidim, in Brooklyn as well as in the upstate Hasidic towns.
It’s not a dead language.
But I wonder if it’s still actually spoken on a day-to-day basis by anyone other than Hasidim. I certainly don’t think it’s known widely enough to be used as a lingua franca – in the modern world, I bet English is the lingua franca for much of the world.
I think the Yiddish heyday in NYC was from around 1920 to maybe 1970?
English is easily the #1 second language of the world today. It isn’t actually close. Hollywood & the Internet has had a huge amount to do with this.
I think there is nearly a billion English as a second language speakers and only about 400-500 million who speak it as a 1st language. It should put English slight ahead of Mandarin for total speakers.
I’m pretty sure French was the prior most common 2nd language but has dropped way off today. German was the most common one for the Sciences. But that is pretty specific.
My grandmother was born in Rome, and immigrated to the US at a young age. Although Italian was her first language, she refused to speak it in public, for fear that she’d be mistaken for Sicilian.
I’ve heard Italians, in Italy, express their views on Sicily and Sicilians. It was kind of a shock, since to New Yorkers who are not of Italian or Sicilian ancestry, the Italian-American community one knows is mostly Sicilian-American, and we’re kind of unaware that that’s a huge distinction in Italy.
I’ve noticed that there was some weird internalized inferiority among Sicilians and Sicilian-Americans in New York.
My step-grandmother was born and grew up in Sicily and spoke Sicilian. My stepmother was born in Sicily and came to the US at a very early age and learned English when she was sent to first grade in NYC. As her parents became more proficient in English, they spoke it more and more at home, so her Sicilian was, as an adult, not that great (or so she told me – I couldn’t judge).
The grandmother, in particular, believed that she spoke an inferior version of Italian and was embarrassed about it, unfortunately. Although later in life (in her 70s, 80s, 90s) she sought out companions with whom she could speak the language, so she wouldn’t forget it.
My family is Hungarian Jewish. They all grew up speaking Hungarian. None of them speak Yiddish. I always wondered why, since in most of the surrounding countries Yiddish was spoken.
I think it depends on how assimilated the Jewish community was. When they were isolated from the general population, they spoke Yiddish. When they were allowed to be part of the mainstream culture - as in Hungary, Germany and after a few generations, the United States - they spoke the majority language.
My father spoke Yiddish as a child, and though he didn’t speak it in later life, he enjoyed records of Yiddish comedians and Yiddish songs.
One side of my family were Lithuanian Jews and the other side were Polish Jews. They spoke different dialects of Yiddish, and I have a strong sense that Litvaks (Lithuanians) looked down on Polish Jews and considered them to be inferior.
Just a European Goy weighing in on an interesting subject: In his hilarious book “born to kvetch”, Michael Wex explains a lot about Yiddish as a language, and the way it was and to a lesser extent still is in use today in Northern America. There are two main variants still spoken in ashkenazi communities AFAIK, the Litvak and the Polish variant. There were more, especially a seperate variant spoken in the Low Countries, which has died out or more aptly has been murdered with its speakers. Remnants of Low Country Yiddish are still to be found in the (criminal) argot and dialect of Amsterdam and some has found its way into standard Dutch as well (schlemiel, chutzpah or gotspe, tinnef, to name a few).
2016 Canadian census - in one of the heavily-Jewish populated suburbs of Montreal, out of the 30k population - 605 claimed Yiddish as a mother tongue (behind English, French, Russian, and Hebrew), and 1,410 had a knowledge of Yiddish (behind English, French, Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, and Farsi/Persian),
Apparently - this suburb has one of the largest groups of Holocaust survivors (in Canada? North America?, World?). There is a major hospital/geriatric centre there…
Given this kind of tribalism, it seems implausible that e.g. Syrian Jews would feel a need to learn Yiddish after moving to America. But I do not know where to get data on stuff like that.
Absolutely, makes sense. And it’s consistent with the present-day use of Yiddish in NYC’s Hasidic communities, who are still somewhat isolated from the mainstream culture, albeit voluntarily.
