The Yiddish conundrum: a cautionary tale for language revivalism

Abstract

For several centuries, the study of diverse aspects of Yiddish has proven fruitful for wider linguistics and the social sciences. This is not because of any mystical Yiddish fount. It is because of the highly unusual, exotic (and in the twentieth century extraordinarily tragic) trajectory of a language without a country that has meant so much to such diverse groups of left and right, religious and secular, traditionalist and avant-garde, always in stiff competition not just with the onsite national languages but with the two older classic languages of the same people. The use of the ancient Semitic alphabet has added an appreciable array of artful aspects. We have seen how the letter known as silent áyin that symbolized radical socialism in one generation morphed into a symbol of religious traditionalism once the radicals had abandoned it.