Variation in the linguistic repertoire of German Jews in contemporary Berlin - Local interpretation of a global repertoire?

• In Event: Contemporary Language Ideologies: Hebrew in Contact with Diaspora Languages

Abstract

In the present talk I will take a closer look into the “distinctive Jewish linguistic repertoire” (Benor 2008) of German Jews in contemporary Berlin and I will focus especially on the variation in the repertoire and its function.
Like other contemporary Jewish communities (Benor 2011, Klagsbrun Lebenswerd 2016), German Jews have access to and make use of a distinctive Jewish linguistic repertoire that consists mainly of lexical items from Yiddish and Hebrew. The general function of this repertoire is to express and construct Jewish identity as well as the adherence to the global Jewish community. In addition, it offers possibilities for inter- and intraspeaker variation, especially concerning the choice between loans from the different donor languages.
I argue, that the meaning of the variation within the repertoire have both a global and a local component. The decision for an item from one of the donor languages over another might index underlying language ideologies toward the donor languages globally shared by members of other Jewish speech communities. On the other hand, the variation is also interpreted locally as aligning with or distinguishing from subgroups within the local Jewish community.
The talk is based on analysis of qualitative interviews with Jews of different religious (including secular) and linguistic backgrounds. First analysis of my data reveals a slightly growing prominence of Hebrew words which seem to be intertwined with the positive attitude toward Hebrew shared by most speakers no matter of their religious affiliation. Yiddish is generally seen as an index for tradition (cf. Avineri 2014) and used to express religiosity, but serves also to index a (secular) Jewish upbringing in Germany. These examples show that the individual choice for items from the repertoire is a complex interweavement of global language ideologies and local expressions of Jewish identity.

Author

• Esther Jahns, Universität Potsdam