Yiddish dialects

While most Jews in the Rhineland who escaped persecution in the 14th century fled to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, some continued to survive in the countryside of Switzerland, southern Germany and Alsace.

[3] Western Yiddish included three dialects: These have a number of clearly distinguished regional varieties, such as Judeo-Alsatian, plus many local subvarieties.

The Judeo-Alsatian traditionally spoken by the Jews of Alsace is called Yédisch-Daïtsch,[4] originally a mixture of German, Hebrew and Aramaic idioms and virtually indistinguishable from mainstream Yiddish.

[5] According to C. J. Hutterer (1969), "In western and central Europe the WY dialects must have died out within a short time during the period of reforms [i.e. the movements toward Jewish emancipation] following the Enlightenment.

As with many other languages with strong literary traditions, there was a more or less constant tendency toward the development of a neutral written form acceptable to the speakers of all dialects.

In the early 20th century, for both cultural and political reasons, particular energy was focused on developing a modern Standard Yiddish.

This resulted in modern Standard Yiddish phonology, without detailing the phonetic variation among the three contributing dialects or the further distinctions among the myriad local varieties that they subsume.

Such normative initiatives are, however, frequently based on legislative authority – something which, with the exception of regulation in the Soviet Union, has never applied to Yiddish.

The acrimony surrounding the extensive role played by YIVO is vividly illustrated by in remarks made by Birnbaum:There is no standard pronunciation in Yiddish.

The original proponents of this 'standard' were speakers of the Northern dialect and so, without further ado and without discussing the matter or giving any reasons, they decided that their own pronunciation was the 'standard'.

Between 1992 and 2000, Herzog et al. published a three-volume Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, commonly referred to as the LCAAJ.

This provides a detailed description of the phonetic elements of what is presented as an Eastern-Western dialect continuum, and mapping their geographic distribution.