Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic Outcomes of Minority Language Maintenance: Yiddish in New York

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The pace and intensity of globalization have many linguists concerned about the viability of the world's endangered and minority languages. Much is known about how language policy, standardization, and educational practices affect minority language maintenance at the macro-level of the speech community. Comparatively little is known about how these same factors influence inter-speaker variation and the spread of language change within successfully "maintained" language varieties. This dissertation addresses this empirical gap in research on language maintenance by analyzing the factors that constrain variation in Yiddish, a language spoken by nearly 150,000 New Yorkers. Despite popular reports about the demise of the language, the number of native speakers has risen each year since 2010 -- a surprising fact considering that this growth cannot be attributed to the influx of new immigrants from Eastern Europe. Under the direction of Dr. Gregory R. Guy, doctoral candidate Isaac L. Bleaman will carry out sociolinguistic interviews in Yiddish with male and female speakers from New York's two Yiddish-speaking communities: (1) ultra-Orthodox Hasidim, whose commitment to Yiddish is a linguistic reflex of a broader ideology that opposes acculturation to non-Jewish society; and (2) Yiddishists, whose commitment to the language does not preclude them from participating in "mainstream" (including non-Jewish) institutions and cultural practices, e.g., public schooling. Despite their shared linguistic background and geographic proximity, the two communities have very little contact with one another.The analysis focuses on both a phonetic variable below the level of speakers' awareness (release burst duration in word-initial stops) and a morphosyntactic variable that is the focus of explicit correction (number marking on verbs with postverbal plural subjects). The quantitative data extracted from sociolinguistic interviews are supplemented by qualitative data from a text correction task, which will be used to determine the features that speakers deem to be standard or non-standard. Finally, the spoken data are compared with archival recordings of European speakers, in order to assess the rate and trajectory of linguistic change within the two communities.