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- This article primarily discusses linguistic aspects of the word Yeshivish. Note that it can also refer to the specific cultural/ethnic aspect of users of the Yeshivish dialect.
Yeshivish is a form of English spoken mainly by English-speaking Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews who attend or have attended a yeshiva. Yeshivish is the primary vehicle of spoken communication in major American and British yeshivot. At present, only one serious study of Yeshivish has been made, "Frumspeak: The First Dictionary of Yeshivish" by Chaim Weiser. Weiser maintains that Yeshivish is not a pidgin, creole, or an independent language, nor is it precisely a jargon. He refers to it instead, with tongue-in-cheek, as a shprach, a Yeshivish word meaning "language" or "communication", derived from Yiddish, and from the German Sprache.
Linguist and Yiddishist Dovid Katz describes it in "Words on fire: the Unfinished Story of Yiddish" as a "new dialect of English," which is "taking over as the vernacular in everyday life in some ... circles in America and elsewhere."
Comparison with Yiddish
Yiddish use developed among German-speaking Jews in the Middle Ages, separating from its German origin with the addition of words from other languages known to them. Apparently Yeshivish developed along those lines from English. In addition, Yiddish and Yeshivish each have native lexical and grammatical features not found in the languages they draw upon.
Yiddish evolved into an independent language as it diverged from the German, which underwent its own development and evolution, probably aided by the fact that Yiddish became the spoken vernacular for Jews in non-Germanic countries. Yeshivish has not evolved into a separate language from English, perhaps for lack of sufficient time, and perhaps also because American Jews are more integrated into general society than their European forebears were hundreds of years ago. Yiddish speakers and German speakers have some difficulty understanding each other although there is some degree of mutual intelligibility. Yeshivish speakers can understand standard English speakers, the reverse is not always the case.
Yiddish has a pedigree of more than ten centuries; Yeshivish, perhaps a few decades. Written Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet; written Yeshivish almost exclusively uses the English alphabet, although words of Hebrew or Aramaic origin are often written in Hebrew characters with English suffixes added using Roman characters.
There do not seem to be any native speakers of Yeshivish to the degree that it is spoken in yeshivot. While children certainly do pick up Yeshivish terms and patterns of speech from parents, there is no evidence of any two-year olds, for example, who speak as do yeshiva students. In addition, Yeshivish is primarily a male spoken dialect, as documented in "Talmid Chachams and Tsedeykeses: Language, Learnedness, and Masculinity Among Orthodox Jews," by Sarah Bunin Benor Jewish Social Studies; Fall2004, Vol. 11 Issue 1, p147-170. Fathers and sons might speak Yeshivish, particularly of teenage years and above, while mothers and daughters do not.
Some observers note that Yeshivish may develop further to the point that it could be analogous to the historical Judeo-hybrid languages like Yiddish, Ladino or Judeo-Arabic. The Judeo languages were spoken dialects which mixed elements of the local vernacular, Hebrew, Aramaic and Jewish religious idioms. As Yiddish was to Middle High German, Yeshivish may be to Standard American English. However, the integration of modern-day Jews with Gentiles may keep their speech from diverging as far from the standard languages as it did in the past.
Interestingly enough, Israeli Haredim have not developed any language or dialect comparable to Yeshivish. They generally speak standard Hebrew or standard Yiddish.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Yeshivish is drawn primarily from English, although it includes terms from other languages, especially Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic. It is similar to Yinglish, except with more words from other languages and with many Talmudic phrases. In some cases, words are used in different ways than they are used in their language of origin. For example, "Lichora, the hava amina of the Rosh is kneged Tosfos" (trans. "Apparently, the initial understanding of the Rosh was contrary to the view of Tosafot"). "Hava mina" is a noun in Yeshivish, despite being a verb phrase (as "hava amina") in Aramaic, and the only sense of "keneged" meaning "in opposition" as exists in Yeshivish, differs from classical Hebrew where it can also mean "concerning." Similarly, the preposition "by" can be used in Yeshivish where "at," "among," "beside," and "with" would be required in English, as in "I ate by my brother last night." This use of "by" is simply a transference of the meaning of the Yiddish and German word "bei" to the Yeshivish context in English.
Grammar
In general, the grammar of Yeshivish is English grammar. Thus, a non-Yeshivish English-speaker who hears a Yeshivish sentence will perceive a normal English sentence with unknown vocabulary words as the most important words in the sentence. The English is used to set the sentence structure with the Yiddish, Hebrew, or Aramaic words used to fill in the blanks.
This often leads to words of non-English origin being given plurals and verb tenses inconsistent with their language of origin. Most often, the singular form of a Yeshivish noun becomes a plural by adding an "s" to it, as in English, even when the base word is not an English one. Thus, the plural of "yeshiva" is "yeshivas," not "yeshivos" or "yeshivot." Verbs in past tense ("I already davened mincha.") or present ("Quiet, I'm davening.") are commonly used, even though these verbs (daven = "to pray") are not of English origin.
Some verbs, particularly those of Hebrew origin, are often treated as participles, and inflected by English auxiliary verbs. Thus, for example:
- "He was moide that he was wrong."
- "He was" puts "moide" -- "to admit" -- into the third-person singular past tense, creating the present meaning of "He admitted that he was wrong."
- "We'll always be soimech on Rav Plony's p'sak that the eruv is mutar."
- "We'll always be" puts "soimech" -- "to rely" -- into the first-person plural future tense, creating the present meaning of "We'll always rely upon Rabbi So-and-So's ruling that the eruv is permitted."
For a more in-depth discussion of Yeshivish grammar, consult the explanation "The Grammar of Yeshivish," found at the start of Weiser's dictionary (see reference below).
References
- Weiser, Chaim M (1995). Frumspeak: The first dictionary of Yeshivish. Northvale: Aronson. ISBN 1-56821-614-9.
See also
"Yeshivish"