The linguistic position of Western Yiddish between Eastern Yiddish and German

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jürg Fleischer
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2011 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 202726722

Western Yiddish, the vernacular once used by Jews living in German-speaking areas, had nearly vanished by the early 20th century. Divergent research on Western Yiddish variably considers the language as being identical to the co-territorial German dialects or as a variety independent of German and more closely associated with Eastern Yiddish. Relatively little was known about both the linguistic structure and the sociolinguistic situation of Western Yiddish until recently because the nature of the language's history has made it difficult to gather enough evidence for studies. The current DFG project "Western Yiddish in the (long) 19th century: sources, sociolinguistic situation and grammatical phenomena" has shown that Western Yiddish varieties were represented well into the second half of the 19th century, in some regions even much later. We can confirm that the variety has been preserved in written sources that before this project had not been systematically analyzed. In the follow-up project proposed here we intend to compare our analyses of the linguistic structures found in the newly identified and systematically studied sources with linguistic structures in both the co-territorial German dialects and in Eastern Yiddish. We will complete the following tasks: - The Western Yiddish dialect play "Die Hochzeit zu Grobsdorf" (1822; "The Wedding in Grobsdorf"), which had until now received relatively little attention in the literature, will be edited and linguistically analyzed. The length of the play (139 handwritten pages) and the high quality of the linguistic data have accorded the play a special place among the sources made accessible as a result of the current project. The play's text will be transliterated and translated, difficult lexemes and linguistic structures will be discussed in a thorough commentary on the text, and a description and analyses of the text's language will be provided. - Twelve phonological and six grammatical variables as well as two different sections of vocabulary will be analyzed using a databank that has already been completed for this purpose with respect to the Western Yiddish texts identified in the current project. These texts, over 300 in total, make up over 11,000 pages of newly identified 19th century Western Yiddish data. Because of the large mass of material, for each phenomenon a maximum of five examples pro text will be cataloged in the databank. - The Western Yiddish linguistic phenomena uncovered by these analyses will then be compared with German and Eastern Yiddish data. This project will contribute to clarify the status of Western Yiddish using an empirical basis previously lacking. The analyses that have already been completed in the current project indicate that Western Yiddish was a variety with an independent linguistic system that did indeed diverge from co-territorial German.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants