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| VOCABULARY DATABASE > YIDDISH > INFORMATION |
Yiddish is a dialect of High German spoken by Ashkenazic Jews and written in Hebrew characters. It originated in the Rhineland valley and was spread by massive migrations, first to Eastern Europe and later to many other countries.
The earliest records in Yiddish date back to the 12th c. Western Yiddish blossomed as a literary language in the Talmudic academies in Germany, but declined during the 18th c. Soon thereafter, Eastern Yiddish flourished and eventually became a lingua franca for many Jews. After Hebrew and Aramaic, it is the third most important literary language in Jewish history.
Yiddish suffered important losses due to the Nazi Holocaust, the anti-Semitic policy of the Soviet Union and the hostility by early Israeli authorities, who were eager to promote modern Hebrew.
Spoken Yiddish is by and large understood by speakers of German, to whom it sometimes sounds amusing. The language has a typically German grammar, although it does not include its umlauted sounds "ö" and "ü", the palatal variant of "ch", nor the glottal stop. In addition, word-final voicing and intonation provide semantic distinctions, all prepositions govern the dative case, and most tenses and moods are not inflected but expressed by means of auxiliary words. Its prefixing system, essentially German, yields verbs with meanings influenced by Slavic models. Its vocabulary includes many loanwords from a number of languages including Hebrew.
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