RE: yiddish language decline?

[SamWeiss <SamWeiss...>]

At 01:16 AM 3/20/02, Yoel Epstein wrote:
>Has anyone researched this issue?  If, in fact, the use of Hebrew is
>increasing, I believe this will have a profound impact on the future of
>Hassidic culture in Israel.

Several years ago I contributed a book review to a volume which deals 
precisely with this topic.  BTW, the review (titled "A Jewish Language In 
The Making") points to the fact that in many "English-speaking" Orthodox 
Jewish communities the "dying" language of Yiddish may have actually been 
replaced by a new living language formed on English and Yiddish.  This does 
not refer to the Hassidic enclaves in various countries in which Yiddish is 
by all counts far from dying.

<<PIOUS VOICES: Languages among Ultra-Orthodox Jews>>
Edited by Miriam Isaacs and Lewis Glinert
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Issue 138

MIRIAM ISAACS Haredi, haymish and frim: Yiddish vitality and language 
choice in a transnational, multilingual community

LEWIS H. GLINERT
We never changed our language: attitudes to Yiddish acquisition among 
Hasidic educators in Britain

JOAN E. ABRAHAM
Perceptions of English learning in a Hasidic Jewish sect

ZELDA KAHAN-NEWMAN
Women's badkhones: the Satmar poem sung to a bride

MIRIAM ISAACS
Contentious partners: Yiddish and Hebrew in Haredi Israel

BRYNA BOGOCH
Gender, literacy, and religiosity: dimensions of Yiddish education in 
Israeli government-supported schools


Book reviews

AYALA FADER
New World Hasidim: Ethnographic Studies of Hasidic Jews in America, edited 
by Janet S. Belcove-Shalin

MARK R. V. SOUTHERN
The Prime of Yiddish, by David Passow

SAM WEISS
Frumspeak: The First Dictionary of Yeshivish, by Chaim M. Weiser



_____________________________________________________________
Cantor Sam Weiss === Jewish Community Center of Paramus, NJ

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