Belk, Z;
Kahn, L;
Szendroi, K;
(2021)
Absence of morphological case and gender marking in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish worldwide.
Journal of Germanic Linguistics
(In press).
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Abstract
This paper demonstrates that the language of the post-War generations of adult Haredi (i.e. strictly Orthodox), primarily Hasidic, speakers (18 to 87) of Yiddish in the major Hasidic centres worldwide lacks morphological case and gender. Elicited spoken and written data from native Haredi speakers of Yiddish from Israel and the United States, and limited additional evidence from Canada and Belgium reveals a complete absence of distinction between masculine, feminine, and neuter genders as well as between the nominative, accusative, and dative cases. While some speakers make use of a variety of morphological definite determiner and attributive adjective forms, their use is not determined by case or gender distinctions. These speakers have an invariable determiner pronounced as /dɛ/ or /di/, and the earlier case and gender suffixes on attributive adjectives have been reanalysed as a single attributive marker, /ɛ/. These findings are consistent with our previous work on the loss of case and gender in the Hasidic Yiddish of London’s Stamford Hill, and support our proposal that the Yiddish spoken in (primarily Hasidic) Haredi communities can be considered a distinct variety of the language known as Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish
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