The Emergence of Two First-Person Plural Pronouns in Haredi Jerusalemite Yiddish

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the rise of a new distinction in the first-person plural pronouns in Jerusalemite Yiddish, a contemporary dialect of Yiddish spoken in Israel by ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jews. The distinction is semantically-pragmatically motivated, where a particular pronoun is used to refer to a specific subgroup of “us” compared with “them.” This innovation evolved as a result of both dialect contact and of the special sociolinguistic characteristics of the Haredi community in Israel. A rare phenomenon in the languages of the world, it reflects the unique self-imposed seclusion that is the social reality of speakers of Haredi Yiddish.*