Panel, Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish Language: Findings from Field Research
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Israel and Sala Disenhouse Memorial Event
Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish Language: Findings from Field Research
Panel featuring Sonya Yampolskaya (University College London) and Kriszta Eszter Szendröi (University of Vienna).
Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish is a newly emerging variety of Yiddish. While it preserves many features of pre-World War II Yiddish, it also differs from it in substantial ways, enough to warrant labeling it as a distinct variant. Despite the geographic dispersion of its speakers, the variety shows remarkable grammatical uniformity, justifying the label Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. Krista Szendrői will discuss the general linguistic characteristics of this variety, while Sonya Yampolskaya will focus on its sociolinguistic dimensions, presenting her research on the unique system of linguistic politeness in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish, distinct from the earlier stages of the language. She will demonstrate how grammatical structures of politeness mirror and reinforce the social hierarchies and cultural values of Hasidic communities.
Dr Sonya Yampolskaya is a linguist and sociolinguist, working mainly with Hebrew and Yiddish languages. Her research interests are focused on Multilingualism, Diglossia, minority and endangered languages, code-switching, language shift and variation, language revival, linguistic politeness and address forms, multilingual Jewish literature and phonology of Old Yiddish. She completed her PhD at the European University of St Petersburg. Following two postdoctoral research positions at University College London, she served as the head of the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department at St Petersburg State University. She worked a researcher at Haifa University and recently finished her research project at the Free University Berlin (as a Humboldtian), undertaking her project on politeness in multilingual Haredi communities. She is currently a senior researcher at Fribourg, Switzerland, working on early Purim Shpiln.
Kriszta Eszter Szendröi is a professor of theoretical and experimental linguistics at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Vienna. Alongside various theoretical topics, for almost ten years now her main empirical focus has been the study of Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish grammar and language use among Hasidim. Together with Lily Kahn, she carried out the largest project ever with a focus on Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish, funded by the UK science foundation (UKRI AHRC), which involved the collection of over 100 hours of recordings with speakers of Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish from all over the world, including Israel (Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Tel Aviv), the New York area (Williamsburg, Monsey, Borough Park), Montreal and London’s Stamford Hill.