[2][3][4][5] It points out the influence that social and political conditions can have over a community's perception of the status of a language or dialect.
[6] The facetious adage was popularized by the sociolinguist and Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, who heard it from a member of the audience at one of his lectures in the 1940s.
He had come to America as a child and the entire time had never heard that Yiddish had a history and could also serve for higher matters. ...
From that very time I made sure to remember that I must convey this wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish to a large audience.In his lecture, he discusses not just linguistic, but also broader notions of "yidishkeyt" (ייִדישקייט – lit.
[9] However, Fishman was assuming that the exchange took place at a conference in 1967, more than twenty years later than the YIVO lecture (1945) and in any case does not fit Weinreich's description above.