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The term "Yiddish" is derived from the German word for "Jewish". Yiddish arose between 9th and 12th centuries in southwestern Germany. The most accepted (but not the only) theory of the origin of Yiddish is that Jews from France and Italy migrated to the German Rhine Valley. They developed a language that included elements of Hebrew, Aramaic, Jewish-French, Jewish-Italian, and various German dialects.

In the late Middle Ages, when Jews settled in Eastern Europe, Slavic elements were incorporated.

Ashkenazi culture

The language originated in the Ashkenazi culture that developed from about the 10th century in German Rhine Valley and then spread to central and Eastern Europe and eventually to other continents.

Ashkenazi Jews, also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim, are the Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities in the west of Germany. Ashkenaz is the medieval Hebrew name for the region, which in modern times encompasses the country of Germany and German-speaking borderland areas.

Its geographic extent did not coincide with the German Christian principalities; Ashkenaz included northern France. It also bordered on the area inhabited by the Sephardim, or Spanish Jews, which ranged into southern France. Thus, Ashkenazim or Ashkenazi Jews are literally "German Jews."

The settlement in Germany ran Jews into the dialemma: to choose Hebrew as a language or to use the German one. The first created the additional difficulties in the life of Jews. The second signified to lose the Jewish roots. The Jews took a remarkable solution: to develop a new language.

In the earliest surviving references, the oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish is a blessing from a Hebrew prayer book from 1272, the language is called "language of Ashkenaz".

In common usage, the language is called literally "mother tongue," distinguishing it from biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, which are collectively termed "holy tongue". The term "Yiddish" did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature of the language until the 18th century.

The Ashkenazi community also had its own geography, with a pattern of relationships among settlements that was somewhat independent of its non-Jewish neighbors. This led to the consolidation of Yiddish dialects, the borders of which did not coincide with the borders of German dialects.

Many Ashkenazi Jews later migrated, largely eastward, forming communities in non-German-speaking areas, including Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere between the 10th and 19th centuries. With them, they took and diversified Yiddish. For a significant portion of its history, Yiddish was the primary spoken language of the Ashkenazi Jews and once spanned a broad dialect continuum from Western Yiddish to three major groups within Eastern Yiddish.

Eastern and Western Yiddish are most markedly distinguished by the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin in the Eastern dialects. While Western Yiddish has few remaining speakers, Eastern dialects remain in wide use.

Although in the 11th century they comprised only 3 percent of the world's Jewish population, Ashkenazi Jews accounted for (at their highest) 92 percent of the world's Jews in the middle of 19th century and today make up approximately 80 percent of Jews worldwide. The majority of the Jews who migrated from Europe to other continents in the past two centuries are Ashkenazim, Eastern Ashkenazim in particular. Most Jewish communities with extended histories in Europe are Ashkenazim, with the exception of those associated with the Mediterranean region.

This is especially true in the United States, where 6 out of the 7 million American Jewish population are Ashkenazi, representing the world's single largest concentration of Ashkenazim.

The Jewish community in the United States is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe, and their U.S.-born descendants. The Jewish community in America, therefore, manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions, as well as encompassing the full spectrum of religious observance, from the ultra-Orthodox communities to Jews who live a secular lifestyle.

Yiddish in the 20th century

In the 20th century, Yiddish rich literature was more widely published than ever. Mendele Moykhe Sforim gave Yiddish a literary legitimacy and respectability and Isaac Bashevis Singer got the Nobel Prize for his studying and writings in Yiddish. Yiddish theater and Yiddish film were booming. Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries (notably Poland) after World War I led to an increase in formal Yiddish-language education, more uniform orthography, and to the 1925 founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO.

YIVO is a source for orthography, lexicography, and other studies related to the Yiddish language. Though it was later renamed the Institute for Jewish Research, it is almost always known by its original initials, which, in Yiddish, form the acronym "YI-V-O".

Founded at a conference in Berlin, but headquartered in Vilna -- a city in eastern Poland with a largely Jewish population, the early YIVO also had branches in Berlin, Warsaw, and New York City. Over the next decade, smaller groups arose in many of the other countries with Ashkenazic Jewish populations.

Max Weinreich was co-founder of the YIVO Institute in Vilna and one of the world's most important scholars of the Yiddish language. He completed "History of the Yiddish Language," his magnum opus, shortly before his death.

"History of the Yiddish Language" is a classic of Yiddish scholarship and is the only comprehensive scholarly account of the Yiddish language from its origin to the present. A monumental, definitive work, "History of the Yiddish Language" demonstrates the integrity of Yiddish as a language, its evolution from other languages, its unique properties, and its versatility and range in both spoken and written form. Originally published in 1973 in Yiddish by the YIVO and partially translated in 1980, it is now being published in full in English for the first time.

The Nazi advance into Eastern Europe caused YIVO to move its operations to New York, with a second important center established as the Fundacion in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A third active center of activities today is the Chicago YIVO Society.

Part of the YIVO archives and leadership fortuitously survived the war. For their own reasons, the Nazis carried the bulk of YIVO's archives to Berlin, where the papers survived the war intact and eventually ended up in New York, and all four directors of YIVO's research sections were already in the Americas when the war broke out or were able to make their way there.

YIVO preserves manuscripts, rare books, and diaries, and other Yiddish sources. The YIVO Library in New York contains more than 385,000 volumes dating from as early as the 16th century. The YIVO archives hold more than 24 million documents, photographs, recordings, posters, films, posters, and other artifacts. Together, they comprise the world's largest collection of materials related to the history and culture of Central and Eastern European Jewry and the American Jewish immigrant experience.

The archives and library collections also hold many works in 12 major languages, including English, French, German, Hebrew, Ladino, Polish, and Russian.

On the eve of World War II, there were 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers. The Holocaust led to a dramatic, sudden decrease in the use of Yiddish, as the extensive Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day life were largely destroyed. Although millions of Yiddish speakers survived the war (including nearly all Yiddish speakers in the Americas), further assimilation in countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union along with the strictly monolingual stance of the Zionist movement, led to a decline in the use of Eastern Yiddish. However, the number of speakers within the widely dispersed Orthodox (mainly Hasidic) communities is now increasing.

The language, which had lost many of its native speakers during WWII, has been making somewhat of a comeback. Modern Yiddish education conducts to keep and widen the Yiddish language.There has been a resurgence in Yiddish learning in recent times among many from around the world with Jewish ancestry.

There are various universities worldwide that now offer Yiddish programs based on the YIVO Yiddish standard. Many of these programs are held during the summer and are attended by Yiddish enthusiasts from around the world. One such school located within Vilnius University (Vilnius Yiddish Institute) was the first Yiddish center of higher learning to be established in post-Holocaust Eastern Europe. Vilnius Yiddish Institute is an integral part of the four-century-old Vilnius University.

What is Yiddish?

The basic grammar and vocabulary of Yiddish, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet, as opposed to a Latin alphabet, is Germanic. Yiddish, however, is not a dialect of German but a complete language -- one of a family of Western Germanic languages.

Really, the vocabulary of Yiddish in Europe during recent times comprised about 85 percent German, 10 percent Hebrew, and 5 percent Slavic with traces of other elements. Many English words and phrases entered Yiddish, becoming an integral part of the language as it is spoken in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.

Apart from vocabulary changes, modern Yiddish differs from modern German mainly in simplification of inflections and syntax, the acquisittion of a few grammatical traits influenced by Slavic languages. In word formation and use of auxiliary verbs, Yiddish is similar to English, which also is a Germanic language with a simplified grammar and a variously enriched vocabulary.

Yiddish is a highly plastic and assimilative language, rich in idioms, and possessing remarkable freshness, pithiness, and pungency. Yiddish contains a wealth of word and expressions descriptive of character and of relations among people. It makes liberal use of diminutives and terms of endearment and exhibits a variety of expletives. The use of proverbs and proverbial expressions is considerable.

These qualities and usages give Yiddish uniquely warm and personal flavor.

Volf Shnaydman is a visiting professor at Rutgers University.