Did the YIVO Linguists Disregard Hasidic Yiddish?

Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series See all lectures » Admission: Free Watch the video

Leyzer Burko | Delivered in Yiddish.

Today most native Yiddish speakers are Hasidim who speak dialects which are quite different from the Standard Yiddish that was codified by the YIVO linguists and is taught in most classes around the world. What led to the significant discrepancy between these two varieties? As Litvaks and secularists, did the YIVO linguists deliberately disregard Hasidic Yiddish out of anti-religious or anti-Hasidic prejudice? Did they design Standard Yiddish to conform with their own Litvak dialect?

This talk will attempt to answer these questions by contrasting the separate development of Standard Yiddish and Hasidic Yiddish both in Europe and America. Like most secular Jews, the YIVO linguists were generally estranged from Hasidim, but there were moments of contact between the two groups. In particular, Uriel Weinreich was interested in the Yiddish of the Transcarpathian region, the area most post-war Yiddish speaking Hasidim came from, and he encountered many ultra-Orthodox speakers in the course of his dialect interviews. To a degree, he even foresaw the current set of circumstances.

About the Speaker

Leyzer Burko is a Yiddishist from New York with a doctorate in Modern Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary. His research interests include the history of the Yiddish language, Yiddish dialectology, Hasidic Yiddish and Yiddish lexicography. In his spare time, he works on a Yiddish Dialect Dictionary.