Languages and Linguistics

Not the current term, but it's still around.

At the same time, language is deeply social. You pick and choose your language to show who you are, who you want to be.

The first is trendy. We "code switch" to show solidarity with "our people" and wall off "not out people." (Okay, a strange allusion: " 'Ami' versus "lo 'ami", but it's not a Yiddish reference.)

It went to "prestige" (a tautologic term that meant the group that spoke it was looked up to and you wanted to be like them. I note that this is now dismissed as retrograde, mostly because it yields undesirable outcomes. The "prestige," "trendy" forms of language are not "NBC English." Dog.)

The second is also of long standing. Back in the '60s Labov showed that those with no hope or aspirations to be "middle class" in NYC were r-less, i.e., "car" was "cah". But if you had social climbing aspirations, you were "car" (not firmly, but mostly).


Back in the late '70s I was in a "house church" and we'd go over to this one woman's house for shabbat (or pick her up and drive her to services--she had some genetic disorder that made it impossible for her to speak or, on bad days, to even look where she wanted; she was taken advantage of horribly by her tenants; she lived in an old Jewish section of Newark, NJ, long very much non-Jewish by 1978, and even the racism I saw at the time made me cringe). I saw that she had a very nice Torah, and next to it was something in Yiddish--I knew the alphabet, but the words were strange. It was her first language. I found something in the school library that explained Yiddish phonology and orthography and it made sense. A week later I was wandering up 1st Avenue (she lived in NE Jersey, I went to school a 15-minute walk and 15-minute PATH ride from NYC) and saw a newspaper in Yiddish. Bought it. Next shabbat took it with me and read the news from her. My accent must have been horrible, but she said she hadn't heard the language spoken even that well, apart from set phrases picked up by goyyim, for years.

Now I'm merely amused at how it appears that Israeli Hebrew sometimes uses Yiddish spellings for Western, obviously non-Hebrew, names. Sort of like how "Tomaszewski" (pron. "Tom-a-shef-sky&quot is Polish in orthography and at odds with English orthographic systems.