Yiddish

Yiddish, historically Judeo-German or Jewish German, is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages, and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages. Yiddish has traditionally been written using the Hebrew alphabet.

For centuries, Yiddish was the vernacular of Ashkenazi communities. Starting from the late 18th century, under the impulse of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the language suffered decreasing prestige, being stigmatized by assimilationists and later also Zionists, in favor of national languages and Hebrew. Efforts by the Yiddishist movement to counter this met limited success. Nevertheless, before World War II, the language still counted 11–13 million speakers. 85% of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, leading to a massive decline in the use of the language. This, along with further assimilation following World War II and aliyah (immigration to Israel), sped up the process of language shift to national tongues and Modern Hebrew, particularly among secular Jews. The number of Yiddish speakers is, however, on the rise in Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) communities. In 2014, YIVO stated that "most people who speak Yiddish in their daily lives are Hasidim and other Haredim", whose population was estimated at the time to be between 500,000 and 1 million. A 2021 estimate from Rutgers University was that there were 250,000 American speakers, 250,000 Israeli speakers, and 100,000 in the rest of the world (for a total of 600,000).

The earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and call the language לשון־אַשכּנז‎ (loshn-ashknaz; lit. 'language of Ashkenaz') or טײַטש‎ (taytsh), a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for Middle High German. Colloquially, the language is sometimes called מאַמע־לשון‎ (mame-loshn; lit. 'mother tongue'), distinguishing it from לשון־קודש‎ (loshn koydesh; lit. 'holy tongue'), meaning 'Hebrew and Aramaic'. The term "Yiddish", short for "Yidish-Taitsh" ('Jewish German'), did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature until the 18th century. In the late 19th and into the 20th century, the language was more commonly called "Jewish", especially in non-Jewish contexts, but "Yiddish" is again the most common designation today.

Modern Yiddish has two major dialect groups: Eastern and Western. Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern (Ukrainian–Romanian), Mideastern (Polish–Galician–Eastern Hungarian), and Northeastern (Lithuanian–Belarusian) dialects. Eastern Yiddish differs from Western Yiddish both by its far greater size and the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin. Western Yiddish, which is divided into Southwestern (Swiss–Alsatian–Southern German), Midwestern (Central German), and Northwestern (Netherlandic–Northern German) dialects. Ethnologue classifies Western Yiddish as endangered.

The term "Yiddish" is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with "Ashkenazi Jewish", to designate attributes of Yiddishkeit ("Ashkenazi culture"; for example, Yiddish cooking and music).