Yiddish vocabulary is primarily Germanic in origin
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Standard linguistic references and encyclopedia sources report that Yiddish is a West Germanic language where German contributes the most to its vocabulary and component multiplicity, although minority views point to alternative lexical origins.
Yiddish is, since Max Weinreich's fundamental work (Weinreich 1973, 1980), referred to as a fusion language in which components of different languages form a comprehensive synthesis. As Yiddish arose in early Ashkenazic communities in German speaking territories from the 10th century onwards, German contributes the most to its component multiplicity. From the start, some Hebrew-Aramaic and Romance elements inherited from the pre-German period were incorporated in the Yiddish language and remained along with the Hebrew script – though Yiddish to this day clearly bears the marks of its genetic origin as a West-Germanic language. The migration of a large number of Jews to Eastern Europe after the pogroms of the 13th and 14th centuries gave way to an enormous influence of the Slavic speaking environment on the rising Eastern Yiddish (as opposed to Western Yiddish, being the variety of the language that was retained on German speaking territory) and hence added a fourth component. In response to the emancipation, Yiddish lost ground in the Western sphere and substantially disappeared in Germany at the end of the 18th century, whereas in Eastern Europe, the number of Yiddish speakers increased rapidly, and gradually the language became regionally differentiated. The pre-war Eastern Yiddish speaking territory may be divided as follows: Northeastern Yiddish (Lithuania, Latvia and Belorussia), Southeastern Yiddish (Ukraine, Rumania and Eastern Galicia) and Central Yiddish (Poland and Western Galicia). The great migratory movements at the turn of the century spread the Yiddish language to the far corners of the earth, with several vernaculars being the source of a fifth component. The persecutions and the genocide through the Nazi-regime led to the annihilation of a vast number of Yiddish speakers, all but completely destroying the language in its historical territory and giving proportionally more importance to the rapidly evolving varieties of the new emigration countries.
... Yiddish lexicon reveal a rich corpus of unique Turkic or Iranian elements unattested in the coterritorial and ... origin , since Turkic and Iranian languages also have this conjugation for the inte- gration of Arabic verbal ...
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A West Germanic, or more specifically High German, language that developed from Middle High German dialects, with an admixture of vocabulary from multiple source languages including Hebrew-Aramaic, Romance, Slavic, English, etc., and mostly written in Hebrew characters which is used mainly among Ashkenazic Jews from central and eastern Europe.: #:
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#* {{quote-text|en|year=1983|author=Philip Baldi|title=An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages|page=128
|passage=Yiddish is a High German language two varieties of Yiddish developed }}
of the Russian Empire. Yiddish is written using Hebrew script rather than the Latin alphabet, making it one of the few Germanic languages to use a non-Latin
German dialects are the various traditional local varieties of the German language. Though varied by region, those of the southern half of Germany beneath the Benrath line are dominated by the geographical spread of the High German consonant shift, and the dialect continuum that connects High German to the neighboring varieties of Low Franconian (Dutch) and Low German.
The varieties of German are
High German is divided into Central German, High Franconian and Upper German.
Central German dialects include Ripuarian, Moselle Franconian, Rhine Franconian (incl. Hessian), Lorraine Franconian, Thuringian, Silesian, High Prussian, Lusatian dialects and Upper Saxon. They are spoken in the southeastern Netherlands, eastern Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of northeastern France and in Germany approximately between the River Main and the southern edge of the Lowlands.
High Franconian dialects are transitional dialects in between the two greater High German groups. High Franconian dialects include East Franconian and South Franconian.
Upper German dialects include Alemannic in the broad sense (incl. Alsatian, Swabian) and Bavarian (Southern Bavarian, Central Bavarian and Northern Bavarian) and are spoken in parts of northeastern France, southern Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria, and in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Italy.
Standard High German is based on Central and Upper German.
The Moselle Franconian varieties spoken in Luxembourg have been officially standardized and institutionalized and so are usually considered a separate language, known as Luxembourgish.
Halcnovian, Wymysorys, Sathmarisch and Transylvanian Saxon are High German dialects of Poland and Romania.
The High German varieties spoken by Ashkenazi Jews developed into a distinct language known as Yiddish, generally considered as a separate language from German, but retaining the core grammatical structure and much of the basic vocabulary of its German dialectal origins. Originating in the Rhine Valley region of medieval Germany in the 9th century, Yiddish developed into two main branches: Western Yiddish, which remained in German-speaking territories (particularly southern Germany, Alsace, Switzerland, and the Netherlands), and Eastern Yiddish, which spread eastward as Jewish communities migrated to Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Lithuania, and areas of the Russian Empire.
Yiddish is written using Hebrew script rather than the Latin alphabet, making it one of the few Germanic languages to use a non-Latin writing system as its standard. Linguistically, both varieties of Yiddish show their closest…
"For many centuries Jews and Germans were economically and culturally of significant importance in East-Central and Eastern Europe. Since both groups had a very similar background of origin (Central Europe) and spoke languages which are related to each other (German/Yiddish), the question arises to what extent Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe share common historical developments and experiences. This volume aims to explore not only entanglements and interdependences of Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe from the late middle ages to the 20th century, but also comparative aspects of these two
The Yiddish language is over 1,000 years old and incorporates German, Slavic, and Hebrew elements. The prevalent view claims Yiddish has a German origin, whereas the opposing view posits a Slavic origin with strong Iranian and weak Turkic substrata. One of the major difficulties in deciding between these hypotheses is the unknown geographical origin of Yiddish speaking Ashkenazic Jews (AJs). An analysis of 393 Ashkenazic, Iranian, and mountain Jews and over 600 non-Jewish genomes demonstrated that Greeks, Romans, Iranians, and Turks exhibit the highest genetic similarity with AJs. The Geographic Population Structure analysis localized most AJs along major primeval trade routes in northeastern Turkey adjacent to primeval villages with names that may be derived from "Ashkenaz." Iranian and mountain Jews were localized along trade routes on the Turkey's eastern border. Loss of maternal haplogroups was evident in non-Yiddish speaking AJs. Our results suggest that AJs originated from a Slavo-Iranian confederation, which the Jews call "Ashkenazic" (i.e., "Scythian"), though these Jews probably spoke Persian and/or Ossete. This is compatible with linguistic evidence suggesting that Yiddish is a Slavic language created by Irano-Turko-Slavic Jewish merchants along the Silk Roads as a cryptic trade language, spoken only by its originators to gain an advantage in trade. Later, in the 9th century, Yiddish underwent relexification by adopting a new vocabulary that consists of a minority of German and Hebrew and a majority of newly coined Germanoid and Hebroid elements that replaced most of the original Eastern Slavic and Sorbian vocabularies, while keeping the original grammars intact.
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