The Linguistic Marginalization of Hasidic Yiddish

• In Event: Hasidic Yiddish: Maintaining a changing language

Abstract

Unlike other Yiddish dialects that were diminished to the point of virtual obsolescence in the decades following World War II, Hasidic Yiddish (HY) remains the dominant language for several hundred thousand Hasidic Jews across the globe. In this talk I discuss how, despite its vitality, HY was marginalized by the Yiddish linguistic establishment. Surveying the literature on Yiddish from the 1960’s to the present, I illustrate the conspicuous absence of formal analyses focusing on HY. While considering oft-cited challenges, including community access, I argue that the marginalization of HY is primarily the result of negative social evaluations by secular Yiddish linguists towards Hasidim. Such ideologies have created and perpetuated a disciplinary preoccupation with a hypothetical standard at the expense of theoretically informative empirical studies of an evolving Yiddish dialect. These attitudes are also ironic, given that early Yiddish language studies were conceived in part as a way of countering the stigmatizing discourses towards Yiddish that were prevalent in Europe at the time. Drawing on sociolinguistic interviews with native HY speakers I also focus briefly on a possible effect of the stigmatization of this variety, the phenomenon Labov (1966) refers to as linguistic self-hatred, whereby speakers internalize the attitudes of the dominant group and develop negative opinions about the dialect they speak. Finally, I highlight significant contributions that recent empirical studies of HY, conducted by a new generation of Yiddish linguists, are making to the field of linguistics.

Author

• Chaya Rachel Nove, The Graduate Center, CUNY