Syntax and morphology of Yiddish dialects
Findings from the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry
20th century fascism significantly disrupted European Jewish cultures, leading survivors to relocate and partially revitalize their heritage. This upheaval also affected languages, which were either abandoned due to assimilation or altered by new cultural interactions. By the 1950s, it became clear that many survivors would not pass their mother tongue to future generations. Uriel Weinreich recognized the urgent need to document the language and culture of these speakers. His project, “Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry” (LCAAJ), involved 18 interviewers collecting nearly 1,000 interviews from 1959 to 1972 using an extensive questionnaire. The LCAAJ material serves as a vital resource for understanding the historical Yiddish dialects of Central Europe. In 2018, Columbia Libraries published digitized copies of the field notes, making this raw data publicly accessible. Between 2017 and 2022, the “Syntax of Eastern Yiddish Dialects” (SEYD) project analyzed these notes, focusing on syntactic and morphological structures. This volume presents selected findings, emphasizing empirical data within a (micro)typological context, complemented by numerous maps illustrating the grammatical variation across former European Yiddish dialects.
