"Hebrew to study the classic literature, and Jewish languages like Yiddish and Ladino were commonly used as recently as the early 20th century, most Jews lack such knowledge today and English has by and large superseded most Jewish vernaculars. The three most commonly spoken languages among Jews today are Hebrew, English, and Russian. Some Romance languages, particularly French and Spanish, are also widely used. Yiddish has been spoken by more Jews in history than any other language, but it is far less used today following the Holocaust and the adoption of Modern Hebrew by the Zionist movement and the State"
"German either. It had a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual structure, some of the smaller ethnicities and languages used at different times were Dutch, Italian, French, Czech and Polish. By the Middle Ages, large numbers of Jews lived in the Holy Roman Empire and had assimilated into German culture, including many Jews who had previously assimilated into French culture and had spoken a mixed Judeo-French language. Upon assimilating into German culture, the Jewish German peoples incorporated major parts of the German language and elements of other European languages into a mixed language known as Yiddish. However tolerance and assimilation of Jews in"
"High German. Colloquially, the language is sometimes called (""mame-loshn"", ""mother tongue""), distinguishing it from (""loshn koydesh"", ""holy tongue""), meaning Hebrew and Aramaic. The term ""Yiddish"", short for ""Yidish Taitsh"" ""Jewish German"", did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature until the 18th century. In the late 19th and into the 20th century the language was more commonly called ""Jewish"", especially in non-Jewish contexts, but ""Yiddish"" is again the more common designation today. Modern Yiddish has two major forms. Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern (Ukrainian–Romanian), Mideastern (Polish–Galician–Eastern Hungarian), and Northeastern (Lithuanian–Belarusian) dialects. Eastern"
"language, and was indistinguishable from the Occitan spoken by non-Jews. Many ancient and distinct Jewish languages, including Judaeo-Georgian, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Berber, Krymchak and Judeo-Malayalam have largely fallen out of use due the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish exodus from Arab lands, the assimilation policies of Israel in its early days and other factors. Yiddish was the language spoken by the largest number of Jews in the 1850s, but today the three most commonly spoken languages among Jews are English, modern Hebrew, and Russian—in that order.. Yiddish, as well as several other Jewish languages, has contributed to the"
"people who can understand it (at least 5 million in Germany and 1.7 million in the Netherlands); Yiddish, once used by approximately 13 million Jews in pre-World War II Europe and Scots, both with 1.5 million native speakers; Limburgish varieties with roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border; and the Frisian languages with over 0.5 million native speakers in the Netherlands and Germany. The main North Germanic languages are Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, all of which are now"
"Ashkenazi Jews Ashkenazi Jews, also known as Ashkenazic Jews or simply Ashkenazim (, , singular: , ; also """"), are a Jewish diaspora population who coalesced in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium. The traditional diaspora language of Ashkenazi Jews is Yiddish (a Germanic language with elements of Hebrew and Aramaic), developed after they had moved into northern Europe: beginning with Germany and France in the Middle Ages. For centuries they used Hebrew only as a sacred language, until the revival of Hebrew as a common language in Israel. Throughout their time in Europe, Ashkenazim"
"or other Jewish elements. This is a transitory state in the shift from use of a Jewish to a non-Jewish language, often made in the context of assimilation. This occurred, for example, with many educated German Jews who transitioned from Western Yiddish to German. This variety of German, used between 1760 and the end of the 19th century (the Haskala), was written with the Hebrew alphabet, and contained a small number of Hebrew and Yiddish loans. An example is Moses Mendelsohn's translation of the Hebrew Bible into German written with Hebrew letters. Among the most widely spoken Jewish languages to"
"century BCE, Aramaic, a closely related tongue, joined Hebrew as the spoken language in Judea. By the 3rd century BCE, some Jews of the diaspora were speaking Greek. Others, such as in the Jewish communities of Babylonia, were speaking Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of the Babylonian Talmud. These languages were also used by the Jews of Israel at that time. For centuries, Jews worldwide have spoken the local or dominant languages of the regions they migrated to, often developing distinctive dialectal forms or branches that became independent languages. Yiddish is the Judæo-German language developed by Ashkenazi Jews who migrated"
"ongoing contact with the Romans), whereas the east Germanic languages were dying out. West Germanic languages include: German, Yiddish, Dutch, Luxemburgish, Frisian, and English. Combined, these languages are today spoken as a native tongue by more than 450 million people worldwide. North Germanic languages are Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic. Roughly 20 million people currently speak the North Germanic languages as their native tongue. Later manifestations of the western Germanic languages and their pursuant typological characteristics are due in part to the activities of the Hanseatic League where trade necessitated a ""lingua franca"" from the mainland of Scandinavia all"
"between spoken street language and written language. Among the Jews of Europe, the situation resembled that of the general population, but with: In the Arab Middle East, Ladino and Colloquial Arabic were the spoken languages most prevalent in Jewish communities (with Ladino more prevalent in the Mediterranean and Arabic, Aramaic, Kurdish, and Persian more widely spoken by Jews in the East), while Classical Arabic was used for secular writing, and Hebrew used for religious purposes (though some Jewish scholars from the Arab world, such as Maimonedes (1135-1204), wrote primarily in Arabic or in Judeo-Arabic languages). The revival of the Hebrew"
"to Central Europe. Ladino is the Judæo-Spanish language developed by Sephardic Jews who migrated to the Iberian peninsula. Due to many factors, including the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, and widespread emigration from other Jewish communities around the world, ancient and distinct Jewish languages of several communities, including Judæo-Georgian, Judæo-Arabic, Judæo-Berber, Krymchak, Judæo-Malayalam and many others, have largely fallen out of use. For over sixteen centuries Hebrew was used almost exclusively as a liturgical language, and as the language in which most books had been written on Judaism, with a"
"the Goths and Vandals, and continueth yet of the greatest part of Poland and Hungary, who have a Dialect of hers for their vulgar tongue ... Some of her writers would make this world believe that she was the language spoken in paradise."" The search for ""the language of paradise"" was on among all the linguists of Europe. Those who wrote in Latin called it the ""lingua prima"", the ""lingua primaeva"" or the ""lingua primigenia."" In English it was the Adamic language; in German, the ""Ursprache"" or the ""hebräische Ursprache"" if one believed it was Hebrew. This mysterious language had"
"Germany as in Israel, bringing the total Jewish population to more than 200,000, compared to 30,000 prior to German reunification. Large cities with significant Jewish populations include Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich. Around 250,000 active Buddhists live in Germany; 50% of them are Asian immigrants. Census results were as follows: German is the only official and most widely spoken language. Standard German is understood throughout the country. Danish, Low German, Low Rhenish, the Sorbian languages (Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian), and the two Frisian languages, Saterfrisian and North Frisian, are officially recognized and protected as minority languages by the European Charter"
"distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardi Jews, who ranged into southern France. Ashkenazi culture later spread into Eastern Europe with large-scale population migrations. Nothing is known with certainty about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. The first language of the Ashkenazim may, as noted above, have been the Aramaic language, the vernacular of the Jews in Roman-era Judea and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia. The widespread use of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic"
"Yiddish as an official Jewish European language, even a Yiddish renaissance, in particular in Poland. On the eve of World War II, there were 11 to 13 million speakers of Yiddish in the world. The Holocaust destroyed the Eastern European bedrock of Yiddish, though the language was rapidly declining anyhow. In the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet Jewish public rejected the cultural autonomy offered to it by the regime and opted for Russification: while 70.4% of Soviet Jews declared Yiddish their mother tongue in 1926, only 39.7% did so in 1939. Even in Poland, where harsh discrimination left the Jews"
"Jewish languages Jewish languages are the various languages and dialects that developed in Jewish communities in the diaspora. The original Jewish language is Hebrew, which was supplanted as the primary vernacular by Aramaic following the Babylonian exile. Jewish languages feature a syncretism of indigenous Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic with the languages of the local non-Jewish population. Early Northwest Semitic (ENWS) materials are attested through the end of the Bronze Age—2350 to 1200 BCE. At this early state, Biblical Hebrew was not highly differentiated from the other Northwest Semitic languages (Ugaritic and Amarna Canaanite), though noticeable differentiation did occur during the Iron"
"was the main language used by the Jewish communities in Catalonia, Balearic Isles and the Valencian region. The Gibraltar community has had a heavy influence on the Gibraltar dialect Llanito contributing several words to this English/Spanish patois. Other languages associated with Sephardic Jews are mostly extinct, ""i.e."", formerly spoken by some Sephardic communities in Italy. Judeo-Arabic and its dialects have been a large vernacular language for Sephardim who settled in North African kingdoms and Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire. Low German (Low Saxon), formerly used as the vernacular by Sephardim around Hamburg and Altona in Northern Germany, is also"
"the Romance languages, interlingual comprehension of the written word is greater than that of oral communication. The following table compares the forms of some common words in several Romance languages: Judaeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, is a variety of Spanish which preserves many features of medieval Spanish and Portuguese and is spoken by descendants of the Sephardi Jews who were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century. Conversely, in Portugal the vast majority of the Portuguese Jews converted and became 'New Christians'. Therefore, its relationship to Spanish is comparable with that of the Yiddish language to German. Ladino speakers today"
"distinguished regional varieties, such as Judeo-Alsatian, plus many local subvarieties. The language traditionally spoken by the Jews of Alsace is ""Yédisch-Daïtsch"" or Judeo-Alsatian, originally a mixture of German, Hebrew and Aramaic idioms and virtually indistinguishable from mainstream Yiddish. From the 12th century onwards, due among other things to the influence of the nearby Rashi school, French linguistic elements aggregated as well, and from the 18th century onwards, some Polish elements due to immigrants blended into Yédisch-Daïtsch too. According to C. J. Hutterer (1969), ""In western and central Europe the WY dialects must have died out within a short time during"
"the Jewish community of Alsace numbered 35,000 people. The language traditionally spoken by the Jews of Alsace was Judeo-Alsatian (""Yédisch-Daïtsch""), originally a mixture of Middle High German, Old Alsatian, Medieval Hebrew and Aramaic, and largely indistinguishable from Western Yiddish. From the 12th century onwards, due among other things to the influence of the nearby Rashi school, French linguistic elements were incorporated as well; and from the 18th century onwards, due to immigration, some Polish elements were blended into Yédisch-Daïtsch too. Several disparaging representations of Jews in medieval Alsatian art, usually showing them with the characteristic three-pointed hat, have survived and"
"to spread their art of theater throughout New York. The creation of “The Yiddish Theater” was established. Yiddish is “a language used by Jews in central and eastern Europe before the Holocaust. It was originally a German dialect with words from Hebrew and several modern languages and is today spoken mainly in the US, Israel, and Russia.” The Yiddish theater consisting mostly of Jewish people and settlers in New York performing Yiddish drama, folktale, and expanding theatrical culture throughout the city. “Jewish audiences (the largest immigrant group in the city at the time), their artistic innovations, energetic style, and engagement"
"America, and Australasia. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic (also known as Common Germanic), which was spoken in approximately the middle of the 1st millennium BCE in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from northern Europe in the 2nd century BCE, to settle in north-central Europe. The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German, with"
"Zarphatic language Zarphatic, or Judeo-French (Zarphatic: ""Tzarfatit""), is an extinct Jewish language that was spoken by the French Jews of northern France and in parts of west-central Germany, such as Mainz, Frankfurt am Main and Aix-la-Chapelle. It was also spoken by French Jews that moved to Norman England. The term ""Zarphatic"", coined by Solomon Birnbaum, comes from the Hebrew name for France, ""Tzarfat"" (צרפת), which had been used in the Hebrew Bible name for the city of Sarepta, in Phoenicia. Some have conjectured that the language was the original language of the Jews who eventually adopted Old High German, which"
"in German, ""judeu"" in Portuguese, ""jøde"" in Danish and Norwegian, ""judío"" in Spanish, ""jood"" in Dutch, etc. In some languages, derivations of the word ""Hebrew"" are also in use to describe a Jew, e.g., ""Ebreo"" in Italian, ""Ebri/Ebrani"" () in Persian and ""Еврей, Yevrey"" in Russian. (See Jewish ethnonyms for a full overview.) The German word ""Jude"" is pronounced , the corresponding adjective ""jüdisch"" (Jewish), and is cognate with the Yiddish word for ""Jew"", ""Yid"". In modern English, the term ""Israelite"" was used to refer to contemporary Jews as well as to Jews of antiquity until the mid-20th-century. Since the"
"language existed and was distinguishable from the other Indo-European languages as far back as 500 BCE. The earliest known Germanic inscription was found at Negau (in what is now southern Austria) on a bronze helmet dating back to the first century BCE. Some of the other earliest known physical records of the Germanic language appear on stone and wood carvings in Runic script from around 200 CE. Runic writing likely disappeared due to the concerted opposition of the Christian Church, which regarded runic text as heathen symbols which supposedly contained inherent magical properties that they associated with the Germanic peoples'"
"the Sephardic counterpart to Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish or ""Ladino"", is printed in Hebrew script.) The Western Yiddish dialect—sometimes pejoratively labeled ""Mauscheldeutsch"", i. e. ""Moses German""—declined in the 18th century, as the Age of Enlightenment and the ""Haskalah"" led to a view of Yiddish as a corrupt dialect. A ""Maskil"" (from the same root word as ""Haskalah"") would write about and promote acclimatization to the outside world. Jewish children began attending secular schools where the primary language spoken and taught was German, not Yiddish. Owing to both assimilation to German and the revival of Hebrew, Western Yiddish survived only as a language"
"Judeo-Latin Judeo-Latin (also Judæo-Latin), La‘az, or Ebraico-Latino is a presumed Jewish language used by Roman Jews, scattered across the Roman Empire, especially those on the Italian Peninsula and in Transalpine Gaul. """"Lo`ez"""" (לועז) is Hebrew for ""foreign language"" (""non-Hebrew language""), and in the Middle Ages, it started to refer to Latin or Romance languages. It is believed that Judeo-Latin is the predecessor of all the Judeo-Romance languages. Few records exist of Judeo-Latin. Leo Levi found some Hebraisms in a few epigraphs in Italy. Other possible source are loanwords in other languages, like in Sardinian ""cenabura"" [ken'abura] 'Friday' (from Latin ""cena"
"develop in the diaspora are Yiddish, Ladino, and the Judæo-Arabic group of languages. Yiddish is the Judeo-German language developed by Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Ladino, also called ""Judezmo"" and ""Muestra Spanyol"", is the Judeo-Spanish language developed by Sephardic Jews who lived in the Iberian peninsula before the Spanish inquisition. Judeo-Catalan (also called ""Catalanic"" or ""Qatalanit""), was the Jewish language spoken by the Jewish communities in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands. Judeo-Provençal (or ""Shuadit"") was the Occitan language as it was historically spoken by French Jews although it was not a distinct"
"of Yiddish and that the language later became Germanised. In other words, the Knaanim, that is, the people speaking the Judaeo-Slavic languages, were the main cause of changes in Yiddish. That view has been dismissed by nearly all mainstream academics, however, and contrasts with the more widely-accepted theories of Max Weinreich, who argued that Slavic loanwords were assimilated only after Yiddish had already been fully formed. A possible early example of Knaanic is a 9th-century letter for a Jewish community of Ruthenia. One of the very few commonly-accepted examples of Knaanic is inscriptions on bracteate coins issued under Mieszko the"
"of the European Commission. German is the most widely spoken first language in the European Union, with around 100 million native speakers. Recognised native minority languages in Germany are Danish, Low German, Low Rhenish, Sorbian, Romany, North Frisian and Saterland Frisian; they are officially protected by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The most used immigrant languages are Turkish, Kurdish, Polish, the Balkan languages, and Russian. Germans are typically multilingual: 67% of German citizens claim to be able to communicate in at least one foreign language and 27% in at least two. The Goethe-Institut is a non-profit German"
"had immigrated in the Middle Ages from Germany and mostly spoke Yiddish as their first language. German-speaking people were more commonly referred to as ""Saxons"" or ""Swabians"", even though most of them did not come Saxony or Swabia (cf. Transylvanian Saxons and Danube Swabians). There were also some Mennonites who mostly came originally from Switzerland, but spoke a dialect of Palatine German which is close to Pennsylvania German. With inhabitants who had a clear difference in language such as with the Saxons or the Roma identification was less problematic, but widespread multilingualness blurred the borders again. It is however possible"
"""produce a work that could be studied daily so that Jews might know the proper procedures to follow minute by minute"". The work was nevertheless written in Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic, since, ""the ordinary Jew [of Eastern Europe] of a century ago, was fluent enough in this idiom to be able to follow the Mishna Berurah without any trouble."" Hebrew has been revived several times as a literary language, most significantly by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement of early and mid-19th-century Germany. In the early 19th century, a form of spoken Hebrew had emerged in the markets of Jerusalem between Jews"
"was spoken by millions of immigrants from Germany, Switzerland, and the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, and their descendants. Many newspapers, churches and schools operated in German as did many businesses. The use of the language was strongly suppressed by social and legal means during World War I, and German declined as a result, limiting the widespread use of the language mainly to Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities. After the First World War, German lost its position as the second most widely spoken language in the United States. Around 1800, two German-language Methodist churches were founded, the ""Vereinigten Brüder in"