New York Hasidic Yiddish From the Mountains to the Metropolis

media release: This talk will also be livestreamed via Zoom

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New York and its surrounding areas host the largest concentration of Yiddish speakers in the world, the vast majority of whom are Hasidic Jews speaking a largely unified dialect referred to as Hasidic Yiddish. This talk examines the origins and current state of Hasidic Yiddish based on three main sources: linguistic data from sociolinguistic interviews with contemporary speakers, Holocaust survivor testimonies from the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe, and historical accounts of postwar Hasidic initiatives. As more than half of the world’s languages face endangerment or extinction, this case study of successful community-driven language preservation offers valuable insights for understanding how minority languages can survive without support from state-sponsored institutions. 

Chaya R. Nove is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Linguistics at Brown University studying variation and change in New York Hasidic Yiddish and its prewar ancestral dialects. Previously, she held a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley where she managed the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE). Chaya earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center and has received support for her research from the Association for Jewish Studies and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.