37.2277, Diss: Germanic; Eastern Yiddish, English; Discourse Analysis, Language Documentation, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics: Emma Breslow: "Diversity in a Diasporic Language: Sociolinguistic Variation in Minority Yiddish Contexts"

Tue Jul 7 16:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2277. Tue Jul 07 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2277, Diss: Germanic; Eastern Yiddish, English; Discourse Analysis, Language Documentation, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics: Emma Breslow: "Diversity in a Diasporic Language: Sociolinguistic Variation in Minority Yiddish Contexts"

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Date: 06-Jul-2026
From: Emma Breslow [ebreslow at hawaii.edu]
Subject: Diversity in a Diasporic Language: Sociolinguistic Variation in Minority Yiddish Contexts

Institution: University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Program: Linguistics
Degree Date: 2026
Level: PhD

Author: Emma Breslow

Dissertation Title: Diversity in a Diasporic Language: Sociolinguistic
Variation in Minority Yiddish Contexts

Dissertation URL: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/113493

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis
                     Language Documentation
                     Phonetics
                     Sociolinguistics

Subject Language(s): Eastern Yiddish (ydd, east2295)
                     English (eng, stan1293)

Language Family(ies): Germanic (germ1287)

Dissertation Director(s): Andrew Cheng

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation applies the theories and methods of Labovian
sociolinguistics to phonetic variation in the small, diasporic
minority-context Yiddish  community. This community is delineated by
usage of Yiddish despite it not being a widely-spoken language in
their neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and other aspects of their
daily lives. While community members are spread around the world, this
study focuses on those in three cultural centers: Boston, Montreal,
and New York City. In analyzing the varied ways speakers produce
Yiddish vowels, rhotics, and word-final plosives, this study
illuminates how a minoritized linguistic community of practice
maintains diversity and innovates new Yiddish varieties. From 30 hours
of interviews with Yiddish speakers and learners, I use qualitative
and quantitative methods to analyze patterns of variation. The two
qualitative analysis chapters use discourse and thematic analysis. The
first of these chapters discusses how the community understands and
refers to itself, as well as emic perceptions of Yiddish’s language
vitality. The next chapter examines language attitudes and ideologies
related to authenticity, standardization, and how community members
define ‘good’ Yiddish.
The following three chapters take a quantitative approach to
sociophonetic variables. The first focuses on particular diaphonemes,
or vowels which are the primary linguistic distinctions between
historical European Yiddish dialects: proto-vowel *ei, as in fleysh
‘meat,’ which can be pronounced /fleɪʃ/ or /flaɪʃ/, *ɔː, as in bodn
‘to bathe,’ which can be /bodn/, /budn/, or /buːdn/, and *u or *uː,
such as in kumen ‘to come,’ which can be /ˈkʊmɛn/ or /ˈkɪmɛn/.
Normalized vowel plots for each speaker were compared to aggregate
plots grouped by the three main Yiddish dialects in order to analyze
how individual speakers pattern compared to the average speaker of
each dialect. I furthermore explored speakers with complicated dialect
patterns, such as those who exhibit balanced multidialectalism leading
to a bimodal distribution for a vowel, or those who mix dialect
patterns by using more salient features from one dialect while another
dialect is represented in the less salient vowels. This chapter’s
analysis shows how historical Yiddish dialects are shifting in today’s
dispersed community and how less salient dialectal features are
merging to create new varieties of Yiddish.
The second chapter examines speakers’ productions of Yiddish rhotics,
called reysh. Unlike dialectal vowels, the choice between alveolar or
uvular rhotics has not been subject to any systematic phonetic
analysis. Speakers vary between an alveolar tap/trill, an
English-influenced alveolar approximant, and a velar or uvular
fricative or trill. I focus on auditory analysis of word-initial or
intervocalic rhotics, in order to find a pattern to this variation.
Unlike prior literature which suggests these forms are entirely in
free variation, I posit that which rhotic a speaker uses will be
influenced by where they live, the other languages they are exposed
to, and their language attitudes regarding Yiddish pronunciation. This
is more in line with historical literature on Yiddish reysh, which
describe a complex geographic pattern combined with some apparent free
variation. Results of this study show that speakers in Montreal use
more uvular varieties, likely due to their exposure to French, while
speakers in New York City use the alveolar tap, which may be due in
part to the large presence of Hasidic Yiddish speakers in the city.
The last analysis chapter focuses on final-/t/ release, which is a
well-documented sociophonetic variable—including in certain varieties
of Jewish English—but has not been previously explored in Yiddish.
Given that the majority of interviewees in my corpus are native
English speakers, I hypothesize that the English trends of /t/ being
released more to index qualities like intelligence or authority may
also hold in Yiddish. Indeed, I find that /t/-release is more frequent
in careful and authoritative speech contexts in Yiddish. I also note
that—potentially due to an inherent property of Yiddish, the artifice
of an interview, and/or the postvernacular situation of the
minority-context Yiddish community—Yiddish speakers in my corpus
release /t/ at higher rates than have been documented for speakers in
English. Overall, this chapter offers an example of one way to
identify socially-meaningful variation in an underdocumented language.
Overall, my dissertation helps address the lacuna of instrumental
acoustic documentation of Yiddish and diversifies the academic
discussion of Yiddish speakers by focusing on minority-context
speakers from a wide range of backgrounds, proficiency levels, and
amounts of involvement in the community. It furthermore offers an
example of how methods from language documentation can enrich
traditional sociophonetic analysis when working with under-documented
varieties of minoritized languages, and supports Yiddish language
maintenance efforts by providing insight into the varied ways people
pronounce the language.

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