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The Emergence of Two First-Person Plural Pronouns in Haredi Jerusalemite Yiddish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2010

Dalit Assouline
Dalit Assouline*
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
*
Scholion – Interdisciplinary Center in Jewish Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Rabin Building, Mount Scopus, The Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, Israel, [dalitassouline@gmail.com]
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Abstract

This paper demonstrates the rise of a new distinction in the first-person plural pronouns in Jerusalemite Yiddish, a contemporary dialect of Yiddish spoken in Israel by ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jews. The distinction is semantically-pragmatically motivated, where a particular pronoun is used to refer to a specific subgroup of “us” compared with “them.” This innovation evolved as a result of both dialect contact and of the special sociolinguistic characteristics of the Haredi community in Israel. A rare phenomenon in the languages of the world, it reflects the unique self-imposed seclusion that is the social reality of speakers of Haredi Yiddish.*

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Type
ARTICLES
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2010

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References

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