The reflexive (z)ikh: On learning Yiddish as a linguist

I began learning Yiddish over three years ago, and this was the first of many times where my professional knowledge—I am a professor of linguistics who teachers general linguistics and sociolinguistics at a public university in the United States—became relevant to what I learned in the Yiddish language classroom. Linguistics is the scientific and humanistic study of language, and my background in linguistics has been a tremendous boon to me as a learner because it helps me gain insight—developing what others in my field might call metalinguistic awareness, referring to what speakers know about the languages they use—into the structures of Yiddish. These same insights often go unnoticed by native speakers, and they aren’t often explained to new learners in the language classroom. For example, while most adjectives in Yiddish, like gikh (“quick”) or shtark (“strong”), take an -n suffix when they modify a masculine or neuter noun in certain cases, I know that any adjective that ends in an [m], like varem (“warm”) or orem (“poor”), will instead take an -en suffix: here Yiddish speakers avoid an unconscious prohibition against the adjective ending in two consecutive nasal sounds, and we solve that problem by inserting (or epenthesizing) a vowel between them. I can similarly predict that adjectives ending in [n], like sheyn (“beautiful”) and fayn (“fine”), will further transform that -en suffix into an -em as part of a prohibition against two [n]s occurring in close proximity at the end of the adjective: here, two sounds become less similar to each other, a process called dissimilation. This dissimilation of -en to -em even occurs with an adjective like nay (“new”) that ends in a vowel but features an [n] looming just before it, readily becoming nayem. Rather than approaching such “exceptions to the rule” as something that learners need to account for via rote memorization, my background in linguistics has helped me to approach variations in the sounds of Yiddish as something both systematic and predictable, with rules that I can puzzle out and make use of as a speaker.

Far from simply being the domain of linguists, a number of common terms from linguistics often make their way into Yiddish textbooks and classrooms, though these aren’t always clearly defined for students. I have frequently heard Yiddish instructors refer to a syllabic nun, for example, but I have rarely heard an explanation of what it means for a sound to be syllabic: that the single sound forms its own syllable, meaning that a word like bern (“bears”) becomes pronounced as two syllables instead of one. Similarly, I have heard many instructors refer to Yiddish diphthongs without explaining what a diphthong is: a set of two vowel sounds that are treated as a single sound. Depending on the dialect of English you speak, you may be able to feel your tongue and jaw move to produce the multiple vowels of a diphthong when you slowly say the English words toy and tie, just as speakers of Klal (Standardized) Yiddish can feel two vowels distinctly forming when slowly producing the vowel in moyl or the final syllable of the word arayn. My understanding of these terms gives me a leg up in the classroom, and metalinguistic knowledge of the sound processes that affect diphthongs have also helped me to better understand dialect variation in these same vowels, as in Yiddish dialects where the phrase in moyl arayn (“in [one’s] mouth”) sounds more like in mol araan, with each of the two diphthongs in those words being reduced (or degliding) to just a single vowel sound.

My background in linguistics hasn’t only been relevant to better understanding the sound structures of Yiddish, but its grammar system as well. I regularly teach introductory courses in both general linguistics and the grammar of English, and so I am keenly aware that many adult learners might have only a vague understanding of the difference between an adverb and a preposition, or how to distinguish subjects from direct objects, indirect objects, and other verb complements. The same has been true of many of my English-speaking peers in the Yiddish classroom, who often struggle with understanding when and where to use the nominative, accusative, and dative cases of Yiddish in part because they lack a metalinguistic awareness of sentence structure. I regularly host a study group with some friends and former classmates, and more than once these sessions have turned into impromptu lectures on a grammatical topic that one of our instructors assumed their students could already understand. For example, I have been taught by multiple Yiddish teachers that the conjugations for modal verbs are irregular in the third-person singular—so verbs like kenen (“can”), zoln (“should”), and muzn (“must”) conjugate to ken instead of kent, zol instead of zolt, and muz instead of muzt—but these observations went without any explanation of what modals actually are. In Yiddish, modals are a type of verb that signal a speaker’s general intent, ability, or degree of commitment to doing the verb that follows, and so they also include verbs like veln (“to want”) but not a similar verb like vern (“to become”). I have similarly devoted time in our study sessions to explain why the sentence er iz a guter (“he is a good one”) features gut in the nominative case, while er zet a gutn (“he sees a good one”) has it in the accusative, despite the sentences looking almost identical in terms of sentence structure. Here, what’s important is that the initial sentence features a verb that linguists call a copula, which precedes a phrase describing the subject: because we’re just describing the subject, we stay in nominative case. In the second sentence we have a true direct object: the subject does the verb to something else, and that moves us into the accusative case.

As a sociolinguist who researches language in its sociocultural contexts, my background in linguistics has also helped to still the imposter syndrome that strikes many adult learners when it comes to the variety of Yiddish that we learn. Many of us will pick up a mish-mash of dialect features as we work with some teachers who use a strictly Klal Yiddish, and then others who may bring their native Poylish or Litvish into the classroom. Contemporary learners may incorporate the Hasidish-ish Yiddish of Duolingo into our speech, and others will adopt systematic patterns of pronunciation only on certain words—I know a speaker who pronounces kind (“child”) with a strong [t] at the end of the word, a feature known as final devoicing, while keeping the [d] full intact in similar words like yid (“Jew”) and bod (“bath”). And for many heritage learners, there can also be anxiety over learning the “right” dialect—how to make do with the Klal Yiddish of many classroom settings while knowing that the last speakers in our families spoke what we imagine to be an entirely different kind of Yiddish. But as a linguist, I recognize that my own native English is full of these same kinds of variations. My vowels are a mish-mash of my early childhood in Brooklyn and my years living in and around Philadelphia, bits of my sentence structure come from an adolescence in southern New Jersey, and I’ve picked up words like pop (for soda) and bubbler (for water fountain) from time I’ve spent in the Midwest. The Yiddish of many families was similarly full of dialect mixing as Litvaks married Galitzianers and people picked up and moved from place to place. Sociolinguists know that the idea of linguistic purity is a myth, and Yiddish is no different. While some contemporary learners may worry about how to produce a reysh—as a rolled [r] or a quick tap of the tongue behind the top teeth, or as a more “guttural” sound produced at the uvula—similar anxieties were felt by some Yiddish speakers a century ago who were concerned with redn mit a reysh (speaking with an [r] articulated at the front of the mouth). Yiddish learners concerned with how the Yiddish they learn in the classroom might vary from that of a lifelong speaker should know how linguists have challenged the very notion of the native speaker, which exists more as an ideological concept than a linguistic fact, and which is most frequently deployed to further exclude marginalized speakers. But perhaps the most helpful contribution that linguistics has made to my Yiddish learning has been a quote from the late Jon Henner. Jon was a brilliant and thoughtful educational linguist and scholar, a deaf and disabled Jew who spent his career writing about and fighting for equitable access to language. I often spoke with him about Yiddish when I first began learning the language, and his words are worth remembering: “How you language is beautiful. Don’t let anyone tell you your languaging is wrong. Your languaging is the story of your life.”