Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.104 November 24, 1996 1) The survival of Yiddish (Mechel Asheri) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 01:13:57 +0200 From: donnom@netvision.net.il Subject: The survival of Yiddish Talk about language mortality as it applies to Yiddish seems ever with us. Is Yiddish a dead language? Obviously not: I speak it every day of the week. Nonetheless, while there is much talk, there appears to be little tachlis and there are verifiable facts to which, I am sure, much can be added by knowledgeable observers. All linguists who deal with the subject base their assessments of the survival status of a language on a single criterion: is it spoken by children? Michael Krauss says: "languages no longer learned as mother tongue by children are beyond mere endangerment...they are already doomed to extinction , like species lacking a reproductive capacity". Later he refers to "the number of those (languages) "still spoken by children", a radical difference and one which applies particularly to Yiddish. Tapani Salminen in The UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages is quite clear in his definitions: Endangered: some children speakers but decreasingly so. Seriously Endangered: having speakers but practically without children among them. Yiddish is defined by Salminen as seriously endangered and the reason given is that "..a small number of children learn the language but very few of them become active users". It is here that we must examine what the situation really is with regard to Yiddish. When we do, we will find that Salminen is somewhat wide of the mark, and that the situation of the survival of Yiddish is far more complex than simply whether there are children who speak it or not and how many of them there are. It is here that the observations of members of Mendele can be of great use. I think we would all be interested hearing from members with concrete data to offer. Perhaps I may start with my own observations on a few basic facts. In the first place it can safely be said that well over ninety five percent of active male Yiddish speakers under the age of forty -- those who use it within their peer group every day -- wear black, have beards and (usually) peyes and are married to women who cover their hair. To those who think of Yiddish in terms of literature, this is an unpleasa nt observation, since these Jews do not read Yiddish. They speak it, it i s the language of their homes (although this will have to be more closely defined) but the language they read is Hebrew because what they are interested in is written in Hebrew. There is little in Yiddish that attract s them. They may also read the language of the land in which they live to some degree, but almost entirely in newspapers. Now, as to their children, who are the criterion by which language vitality is defined, Krauss's question must be asked, "do they learn Yiddish as their mother tongue?" The answer to this is that increasingly even among the "haredim" --the beard-and-peyes Yidn-- those households in which Yiddish is the only language ever spoken are few in number. The children attend schools in which the medium of instruction is Yiddish and they are not permitted to speak anything else in the classroom, but what happens when they are out on the street? In how many places in the world is it possible to hear Yiddish spoken among children at play? I have heard children at play speaking Yiddish to each other in Boro Park, in Williamsburg and in Crown Heights, as well as such disparate places as Ashdod, Petach Tikva and Safed in Israel, but for whatever my own obse rvations are worth the cut-off point is usually around the age of six. Af ter that, they continue to speak it in class and to a certain extent in o ther situations - the synagogue in particular - but outside those situati ons and places tend to revert to the language of the land. There are, of course, exceptions: Mea Shearim (but only in part) in Jerusalem and such self-contained Chasidic enclaves as Nay Skver in New York. Nonetheless, even here, Yiddish, while it is not yet a second language, may well be a generatrion from now since the children as they grow bigger find themselve s more comfortable in the language spoken outside the home.. To give an example, not concerning children but their fathers, young men, in a hasidic shul in Bnei Brak which I know very well, I found that the men tend to speak Yiddish to each other in shul, but the moment they step out in the street, they switch to Hebrew. In addition, I notice that while both they and their wives speak fluent Yiddish, it is rare to hear them speak anything but Hebrew (or English or Hungarian) between themselves. In the most Orthodox shul in Caracas, Venezuela (and Latin America is still one of the strongholds of Yiddish), Yiddish is the only language heard in the announcements given every Shabbos, in any shiurim given by the ra bbi or another learned member of the congregation, a hesped, the convers ation around the shaloshudes table etc. Nonetheless, there are very few m embers who speak it among themselves outside the shul. There the language s tend to be English and Hungarian. Spanish, while spoken fluently by almost everyone, somehow past nit among the Ashkenazi Jews. In general, Haredi children over six years old tend to speak the language of the land to each other even in shul unless there are severe restrictions against doing so. This includes places like Caracas, where the only people who spea k Spanish in shul are usually children. It must be remembered that before the Holocaust Jewish communities were, if not hermetically sealed off from the world of the non-Jews, so close to it as made little difference. Today, with exceptions such as those cited above, this is no longer true and Jewish communities are not isolated in the same sense that the shtetlach were. The result has been the gradual replacing of Yiddish as a vernacular and its metamorphosis into a langua ge used only on special occasions and for special purposes, a phenomenon which has not gone unobserved by many students of language over the past fifty years. Nonetheless, the actual extinction of Yiddish does not seem very likely to happen in any future that we can see, since it is the lang uage of instruction in the haredi primary schools and in the greater part of the Yeshivas. Where it is going to disappear is in the non-haredi com munities and that is something that must be faced. Even among the haredim we see signs of the encroachment of the la"z . An extremely conservative Ashkenazi yeshiva such as Ponievezh in Bnei Brak gives many of its shiurim in Hebrew today and several yeshivas in the United States, particularly the more modern ones - Yitzhak Elkhanan (Yeshiva University) for example, teach most of their shiurim in English, because as every year passes, the young men who attend these, yeshivos simply don't have enough Yiddish to understand their teachers. That Yiddish will survive as a living language there is little doubt, but within a generation the yidn who speak it will be people who have little in common with most of the members of Mendele. To them Yiddish will be more and more what it already is: a cultural museum piece in which we all take delight, but which few take seriously enough to pass on to their children. Mechel Asheri Petach Tikva ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.104