Bobover Yiddish: “Polish” or “Hungarian?”

Abstract

Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish speakers perceive a distinction between “Hungarian” and “Polish” Yiddish. This article explores that distinction by examining the Yiddish of the Bobover Hasidic community, the largest “Polish” Hasidic group in the United States; the Yiddish of its “Hungarian” counterpart, Satmar, and its rootedness in the Unterland Hungarian Yiddish was demonstrated by Krogh (2012), reflecting the origins of the Satmar dynasty. But is Bobover Yiddish similarly rooted in western Galician Yiddish? Interviews with informants from the Bobover community reveal a mixed picture. All showed phonological features of non-Hungarian Central Yiddish, but all featured “Hungarian” vocabulary. While most of the informants’ grandparents were from interwar Poland, several had grandparents from the Unterland region; one-third identified their spouses as “Hungarian” or were members of “Hungarian” Hasidic communities. This shows the permeability of the two groups, leading to a mixing of features, which creates the need for shibboleths as clear markers of identity.

Complete loss of case and gender within two generations: evidence from Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish

“…Our main finding is that present-day Yiddish as spoken by members of the Stamford Hill Hasidic community has lost morphological case and gender on full noun phrases. In poverty of case and gender morphology, our findings are similar to those of Krogh (2012), Assouline (2014), and Sadock and Masor (2018) for the Yiddish of other Hasidic communities. However, these authors interpret their findings as merely case syncretism, rather than loss of the notion of morphological case or gender from the mental grammar of these speakers.…”

“…While this paper focuses on the language of the Stamford Hill Hasidic community, our initial data from other Hasidic communities suggests that loss of morphological case and gender is a general feature in Hasidic Yiddish worldwide. Krogh's (2012), Assouline's (2014), and Sadock and Masor's (2018) findings are also consistent with this tentative conclusion. Beyond the evidence presented below, we leave the extent to which this pervasive change is a universal feature of Hasidic Yiddish to further research.…”

“…Krogh (2012Krogh ( , 2018 has studied the written language of Satmar Hasidim in the New York area, and Assouline (2014) has analysed certain aspects of the language of Israeli Hasidic Yiddish speakers. Sadock and Masor (2018) offer a basic description of Bobover Yiddish in New York. This paper is the first full report in our ongoing research project studying Hasidic Yiddish, and concentrates on the language of the Stamford Hill Hasidic community, with reference to preliminary data from other communities where relevant.…”

The Loshn Koydesh Component in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish

“…An especially prominent feature of contemporary Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish is its complete lack of morphological gender and case (Belk, Kahn, & Szendrői 2020). This development in the morphological system is also true of Hasidic Yiddish spoken in other locations as well (see Belk, Kahn, & Szendrői under review for details; Assouline 2017; Krogh 2012Krogh , 2018Sadock & Masor 2018 for related discussion). Given the rapid and widespread linguistic development that has been documented in various aspects of the Yiddish of Hasidic speakers, it is instructive to investigate the issue of the loshn koydesh component of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish in order to ascertain whether it too has undergone changes.…”

Translating COVID-19 information into Yiddish for the UK Hasidic community

“…Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish exhibits striking linguistic differences from the traditional pre-war Eastern European dialects of the language as well as from its standardized variety, such as a distinctive orthographic system, absence of morphological case and gender, developments in the pronominal system, various syntactic differences, and many salient lexical differences (see e.g. Assouline 2014;Assouline 2017;Belk et al 2020aBelk et al , 2020bBelk et al , 2022Bleaman 2018;Bleaman 2020;Fader 2009;Kamoshida 2008;Krogh 2012, Krogh 2018Nove 2018b;Sadock and Masor 2018). However, despite the intriguing differences in its structure, and its central role in the contemporary Yiddish world, apart from the studies mentioned above very little research exists on Hasidic Yiddish grammar or language practices (see Nove 2018a for discussion of reasons for this lacuna).…”