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Western Yiddish

yih

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Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken in many parts of the world. It developed as a fusion of different German dialects with adstrats of Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic vocabulary and some traces of vocabulary from the Romance languages. Yiddish orthography uses the Hebrew alphabet. The language originated in the Ashkenazi culture that developed from about the 10th century in the Rhineland and then spread to Central and Eastern Europe and eventually to other continents. In the earliest surviving references to it, the language is called לשון־אַשכּנז (loshn-ashknez = language of Ashkenaz) and טײַטש (taytsh, a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for the language otherwise spoken in the region of origin, now called Middle High German). In common usage, the language is called מאַמע־לשון (mame-loshn, literally mother tongue), distinguishing it from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, which are collectively termed לשון־קודש (loshn-koydesh, holy tongue). The term Yiddish did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature of the language until the 18th century. For a significant portion of its history, Yiddish was the primary spoken language of the Ashkenazi Jews and once spanned a broad dialect continuum from Western Yiddish to three major groups within Eastern Yiddish: Litvish, Polish and Ukrainish. Eastern and Western Yiddish are most markedly distinguished by the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin in the former. Western Yiddish has few remaining speakers but the Eastern dialects remain in wide use. Yiddish is written and spoken in many Orthodox Jewish communities around the world, although there are also a number of Orthodox Jews who do not know Yiddish. It is a home language in most Hasidic communities, where it is the first language learned in childhood, used in schools and in many social settings. Yiddish is also the academic language of the study of the Talmud according to the tradition of the Lithuanian yeshivas. Yiddish is also used in the adjectival sense to designate attributes of Ashkenazic Jewish culture.
Source : DBpedia

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This page is providing structured data for the language Western Yiddish.
Following BCP 47 the recommended tag for this language is yih.

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