eprintid: 10127054 rev_number: 31 eprint_status: archive userid: 608 dir: disk0/10/12/70/54 datestamp: 2021-05-05 13:58:19 lastmod: 2022-03-07 10:55:53 status_changed: 2022-03-07 10:52:03 type: article metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Kahn, L creators_name: Yampolskaya, S title: Contemporary Ashkenazic Hebrew: The Grammatical Profile of an Overlooked Twenty-First-Century Variety ispublished: pub divisions: UCL divisions: B03 divisions: C01 divisions: F14 note: © The author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of Manchester. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited abstract: Ashkenazic Hebrew is a unique language variety with a centuries-long history of written use among Central and Eastern European Jews. It has distinct phonological and grammatical features attested in texts composed by Ashkenazic Jews (e.g. adherents of the Hasidic and Maskilic movements) in Europe prior to the twentieth century. While Ashkenazic Hebrew is commonly believed to have been replaced by Israeli Hebrew in the twentieth century, this traditional written variety of the language actually continues to thrive in contemporary Diaspora Haredi (strictly Orthodox) communities, chiefly the Hasidic centres of New York, London, Montreal and Antwerp. This fascinating and understudied form of Hebrew is used widely and productively in the composition of a rich variety of original documents for a Hasidic audience (about e.g. Covid transmission, United States educational stipulations, Zoom schooling, lockdown rules, etc.). In this article we demonstrate that contemporary Ashkenazic Hebrew has many shared orthographic, phonological, grammatical and lexical features with its Eastern European antecedent. These include: orthography of loanwords based on Yiddish conventions (e.g. חולי הקאראנא xóylay ha-koróna ‘those ill with coronavirus’); morphology of plural loan nouns (בקאלידזשעס be-kóleǧes‘in colleges’, הפראגראמע״ן haprográmen ‘the programmes’); retention of the definite article with inseparable prepositions (בהשכונה be-ha-šxíne‘in the neighbourhood’); date: 2022-04 date_type: published publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP) official_url: https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgab029 oa_status: green full_text_type: pub language: eng primo: open primo_central: open_green verified: verified_manual elements_id: 1861722 doi: 10.1093/jss/fgab029 lyricists_name: Kahn, Lily lyricists_name: Yampolskaya, Sonya lyricists_id: LOKAH13 lyricists_id: SYAMP96 actors_name: Barczynska, Patrycja actors_id: PBARC91 actors_role: owner full_text_status: public publication: Journal of Semitic Studies volume: 67 number: 1 pagerange: 199-267 issn: 0022-4480 citation: Kahn, L; Yampolskaya, S; (2022) Contemporary Ashkenazic Hebrew: The Grammatical Profile of an Overlooked Twenty-First-Century Variety. Journal of Semitic Studies , 67 (1) pp. 199-267. 10.1093/jss/fgab029 <https://doi.org/10.1093/jss%2Ffgab029>. Green open access document_url: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10127054/1/Kahn_fgab029.pdf