Home language usage and the impact of Modern Hebrew on Israeli Hasidic Yiddish nouns and noun plurals
-
Netta Abugov
and
Dorit Ravid
Abstract
This article investigates the current status of Yiddish as a home language and the impact of Modern Hebrew on Yiddish nouns and noun plurals spoken in Sanz Hasidism. In the Hasidic community, Yiddish and Modern Hebrew have been competing as native tongues in an inconsistent bilingual sociolinguistic situation for over 60 years. The aim of this study is two-fold: first, a sociolinguistic issue concerning the amount and character of Yiddish usage across generations; second, to explore psycholinguistic issue regarding the nominal lexicon (kind ‘child’) and its plural marking (kinder ‘children’).
Participants were first asked about the language prevalent in their parental home and in their current home. Then we administered a confrontational naming task to 48 Israeli Hasidic (IH) men and women who were asked to name 95 singular nouns from pictures and provide their plural forms. Results showed that over generations there is a tendency towards using only Yiddish as a home language accompanied by substantial variation and change both in the nominal lexicon and in the plural system. Both facets indicated that participants who grew up in Yiddish-only homes and still maintain this linguistic exclusiveness produce fewer Modern Hebrew-related lemmas.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Lessons from Judezmo about the Balkan Sprachbund and contact linguistics
- The problem of Judeo-French: between language and cultural dynamics
- Let my people know!: towards a revolution in the teaching of the Hebrew Bible
- Nathan Birnbaum's The tasks of Eastern European Jews
- Unity of the German component of Yiddish: myth or reality?
- Slavic influence in Eastern Yiddish syntax: the case of vos relative clauses
- Veiling knowledge: Hebrew sources in the Yiddish sermons of ultra-orthodox women
- Home language usage and the impact of Modern Hebrew on Israeli Hasidic Yiddish nouns and noun plurals
- Bare participle forms in the speech of Lithuanian Yiddish heritage speakers: multiple causation
- A pragmatic and idiomatic Yiddish substrate of Modern Hebrew: insights from translations of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye
- The Folkshuln of America
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Lessons from Judezmo about the Balkan Sprachbund and contact linguistics
- The problem of Judeo-French: between language and cultural dynamics
- Let my people know!: towards a revolution in the teaching of the Hebrew Bible
- Nathan Birnbaum's The tasks of Eastern European Jews
- Unity of the German component of Yiddish: myth or reality?
- Slavic influence in Eastern Yiddish syntax: the case of vos relative clauses
- Veiling knowledge: Hebrew sources in the Yiddish sermons of ultra-orthodox women
- Home language usage and the impact of Modern Hebrew on Israeli Hasidic Yiddish nouns and noun plurals
- Bare participle forms in the speech of Lithuanian Yiddish heritage speakers: multiple causation
- A pragmatic and idiomatic Yiddish substrate of Modern Hebrew: insights from translations of Sholem Aleichem's Tevye
- The Folkshuln of America
