Antwerp Yiddish in the 21st Century – a Snapshot

• In Event: Hasidic Yiddish: Maintaining a changing language

Abstract

The Haredi Jewish community in Antwerp is the largest and most vibrant Yiddish-speaking center in Europe, on a par with the corresponding communities in London and Manchester. Though its foundation as a Jewish settlement dates back to prewar times, the Antwerp community did not achieve its current size and importance until after the Holocaust. Well-known Haredi factions such as Beltz, Wischnitz, and Satmar are based there. Their members, of whom a significant number originate from other Haredi communities around the world, have a variety of occupations and coexist and cooperate in harmony on Jewish as well as non-Jewish matters. The majority of the Antwerp Haredim are native speakers of Yiddish. Yiddish functions as their sole home language, serving all their daily communicative needs. The children of the Haredim do not usually acquire coterritorial Dutch (Flemish) in its full range until school enrollment at the age of 6 or 7.

The Yiddish spoken by generation 2 and 3 speakers in Antwerp today differs significantly from the Eastern Yiddish dialects and subdialects that were brought to Antwerp by the first generation of Haredim in the aftermath of World War II. The different Yiddish varieties of the first generation of speakers have amalgamated to form a new dialect. This idiom, which is essentially a continuation of so-called Hungarian Yiddish, is characterized by the leveling out of certain marked speech forms, by inflectional simplification, and – to a lesser extent – by innovations of its own.

In my talk I will outline selected linguistic features of 21st century spoken Haredi Antwerp Yiddish. The data on which the talk is based was collected during fieldwork on site in 2013 and 2014. Three male speakers, aged between 25 and 35, served as consultants. Of these, only one was born and raised in Antwerp, while the other two had moved there from New York City and Jerusalem as adults. Surprisingly, apart from minor differences, all three turned out to speak the same Yiddish. This fact is indicative not only of the development that Antwerp Yiddish has undergone during the past two or three generations, but also of the linguistic and cultural implications of Haredi transnationalism in the 21st century.

Author

• Steffen Krogh, Aarhus University