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

全球化的速度和强度让许多语言学家担心世界濒危语言和少数族裔语言的生存能力。关于语言政策、标准化和教育实践如何在语言社区的宏观层面上影响少数民族语言的维护，人们已经有了很多了解。关于这些因素如何影响说话人之间的差异以及语言变化在成功地保持了语言变体中的传播，我们知之甚少。本文通过分析制约意第绪语变异的因素，解决了语言维持研究中的这一经验空白。意第绪语是一种近15万纽约人使用的语言。尽管有关于母语消亡的流行报道，但自2010年以来，以英语为母语的人数每年都在上升--考虑到这种增长不能归因于来自东欧的新移民的涌入，这是一个令人惊讶的事实。在Gregory R.Guy博士的指导下，博士生Isaac L.Bleaman将用意第绪语对来自纽约两个讲意第绪语社区的男性和女性进行社会语言学面试：(1)极端正统派哈西迪姆派，他们对意第绪语的承诺是反对非犹太社会适应更广泛意识形态的语言反映；(2)意第绪语派，他们对这种语言的承诺并不阻止他们参与“主流”机构和文化实践，例如公共学校。尽管这两个群体有着相同的语言背景和地理位置，但彼此之间的接触很少。分析的重点既包括低于说话人意识水平的语音变量(单词首字母停顿时的发音持续时间)，也包括作为显性纠正重点的形态合成变量(动词后复数主语上的数字标记)。从社会语言学访谈中提取的定量数据辅之以文本纠正任务中的定性数据，这些数据将被用来确定说话者认为是标准的还是非标准的特征。最后，将口语数据与欧洲说话者的档案录音进行比较，以评估两个社区内语言变化的速度和轨迹。

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.