Yiddish

Yiddish, historically referred to as Judeo-German or Jewish German, is a West Germanic language and Jewish ethnolect historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German, fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic Hebrew) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages. Yiddish has traditionally been written using the Hebrew alphabet. For centuries, Yiddish was the vernacular of Ashkenazi communities. Starting in the late 18th century, under the sway of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the language suffered decreasing prestige, being stigmatized by assimilationists and later also by Zionists, in favor of national languages and Hebrew. Efforts by the Yiddishist movement to counter that trend had limited success. Nevertheless, before World War II, the language still counted 11–13 million speakers. Some 85% of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, resulting in a massive decline in use of the language. This, together with further assimilation following World War II, along with aliyah (immigration to Israel), sped up the process of language shift to national tongues and Modern Hebrew, particularly among secular Jews. The number of Yiddish speakers is, however, on the rise in Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) communities. In 2014, YIVO stated that "most people who speak Yiddish in their daily lives are Hasidim and other Haredim", whose population was estimated at the time to be between 500,000 and 1 million. A 2021 estimate from Rutgers University was that there were 250,000 American speakers, 250,000 Israeli speakers, and 100,000 speakers in the rest of the world (for a total of 600,000). The earliest surviving references date from the 12th century...