Syntax and Morphology of Yiddish Dialects: Findings From the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry

Fascism in the 20th century largely destroyed Jewish culture in Europe. The survivors brought their culture to new environments, where it was partially revived. Languages ​​also fell victim to this destruction. Languages were either abandoned in the course of assimilation and acculturation, or at least significantly influenced by the various new contact situations. When it became apparent in the 1950s that many European survivors would not pass on their mother tongue to their children and grandchildren, Uriel Weinreich recognized the necessity and opportunity to systematically document their language and culture. As part of his project, the 'Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry' (LCAAJ), 18 interviewers collected interviews with nearly 1,000 informants between 1959 and 1972, based on a comprehensive questionnaire. The material collected within the framework of the LCAAJ is an inexhaustible resource and the best source we have on the historical Yiddish dialects of Central Europe. With the publication of digitized copies of the written records (field notes) by Columbia Libraries in 2018, the raw data of the LCAAJ were made publicly available. Between 2017 and 2022, the Syntax of Eastern Yiddish Dialects (SEYD) project analyzed these field notes with regard to syntactic and morphological structures. This volume presents a selection of these phenomena, focusing on the empirical data and their integration into a (micro)typological context. Numerous maps illustrate the spatial dimension of grammatical variation in the former European Yiddish dialects.