Yiddish, an Endangered Language

Hello, my friends. Today, I’m presented before you with yet another endangered language, named- Yiddish. (This blog was created by my good friend Ana Chikvinidze, so all the credit belongs to her.) Without further edu, sit back and enjoy!

Yiddish language is an endangered language. An endangered language means that this language will be soon extinct. Germanic languages include many languages and one of them is Yiddish. It is from the Indo-European language family. Yiddish is the language of Ashkenazic Jews. It has two dialects, Western Yiddish and Eastern Yiddish. Western Yiddish was spoken before the 18th century in Central Europe. Eastern Yiddish was spoken before world war II in Europe and Russia. Some of the Yiddish words sound the same as German but they have different meanings.

The Yiddish language is approximately one thousand years old. Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet and unlike English, it is read from right to left. Yiddish language doesn’t have any lower or upper cases but printed is different from handwritten like Russian.

According to Wikipedia it was about 1.5 million who speak Yiddish in the 1990s but in 2021 there are 600,000 speakers. DataBlog and Omniglot say that there are 3 000 000 speakers but according to Rutgers in 2022 in United states there are quarter million speakers, in Israel also about 250 000 and in the rest of the world there are 100,000. In total it’s 600 000 speakers. Let’s just say that there are approximately from 600 000 to 3 000 000 speakers. Before World War II there was 11 million speakers of Yiddish.

Yiddish is spoken in Israel, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and some of the European countries.

Interesting facts about Yiddish:

· It may sound weird but I don’t know the exact number of letters. some websites say that Yiddish has 22 letters some say that it has 27 or 30.””

· Yiddish means “Jewish”

· Yiddish has many beautiful words which create beautiful songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAP7PbOZmOU&t=38s"

sources

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/apr/15/language-extinct-endangered

https://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/yiddish/102-department-of-jewish-studies/yiddish/159-yiddish-faqs#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%20there,the%20rest%20of%20the%20world

https://www.cal.org/heritage/yiddish.html#:~:text=The%20primary%20language%20of%20Ashkenazic,primarily%20as%20an%20oral%20language

https://www.jewfaq.org/yiddish.htm

https://omniglot.com/writing/yiddish.htm

BY: ANA CHIKVINIDZE

(This blog was made to let others learn about Yiddish and increase awareness of this language.)

(If you want to see the original work, you can head over to Ana’s account- https://medium.com/@anukachikvinidze/yiddish-language-76c9c3a2121c)