**IN YIDDISH** Sonya Yampolskaya, Lebedikayt fun a toyte shprakh: haynt-tsaytike ashkenazishe hebreish
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Himel Family Yiddish Lecture Series
Co-sponsored by the Al and Malka Green Fund in Yiddish Studies
Sonya Yampolskaya (University College London)
“Lebedikayt fun a toyte shprakh: haynt-tsaytike ashkenazishe hebreish ”
Ashkenazic Hebrew is a variety with distinct phonological and grammatical features, known since the Middle Ages and believed to have become extinct in the 20th century. It emerged and disappeared without ever being a vernacular, yet we have a vast corpus of texts written in it. Surprisingly, within Hasidic communities, this variant of Hebrew is still used productively. In this talk, we will explore the mechanisms of its acquisition and use. We will listen to newly created songs in Ashkenazic Hebrew and even watch a stand-up performance in Ashkenozis.
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.