This article describes the standard form laid out by YIVO while noting differences in significant dialects such as that of many contemporary Hasidim.
Yiddish nouns are classified into one of three grammatical genders: masculine (זכר zokher), feminine (נקבֿה nekeyve) and neuter (נײטראַל neytral).
However, a handful of nouns do have inflectional endings to indicate the accusative and/or dative cases, which may be optional or obligatory, depending on the specific lexical item and dialect; examples of nouns that take obligatory case endings include certain kinship terms (טאַטע tate 'father', מאַמע mame 'mother') and the words ייִד yid 'Jew' and האַרץ harts 'heart'.
Another genitive-like construction, the quantitative, is used to describe quantities of objects: אַ פֿול גלאָז הייסע טיי a ful gloz heyse tey (a full cup of hot tea); אַ גרופּע יונגע מענטשן a grupe yunge mentshn (a group of young people).
This construction may not be used if the object has a definite article: אַ פֿול גלאָז מיט דער הייסער טיי a ful gloz mit der heyser tey (a full cup of the hot tea).
A vast number of nouns use irregular plural forms, including -es (these are usually nouns of Slavic origin) and -er with a kind of apophony called Germanic umlaut (e.g., מאַן man 'man' → מענער mener 'men'; קינד kind 'child' → קינדער kinder 'children'), or umlaut alone (e.g., האַנט hant 'hand' → הענט hent 'hands').
Nouns built on the diminutive suffixes -l and -ele form the plural in -ekh (e.g., מײדל meydl 'girl' → מײדלעך meydlekh 'girls'), mirroring some German dialects in this regard.
Finally, there are a few words of non-Hebrew origin that take Hebrew plural suffixes, such as דאָקטער dokter 'doctor' → דאָקטוירים doktoyrim, פּויער poyer 'farmer' → פּויערים poyerim.
ikh mir du ir ets er es zi zey mikh undz dikh aykh enk im mir dir im ir Third person pronouns agree in gender with the noun they refer to.
[1] A T–V distinction, or the use of the 2nd plural form ir for a single addressee for reasons of respect, is archaic in YiVO Yiddish, but appears historically and in many colloquial varieties.
In the present tense, the first-person singular takes the base form of the verb; the other person/number combinations are regularly inflected according to the following table: -n -st -t -ts -t -n A present participle, functioning as a derived adjective or adverb, is regularly constructed by adding the suffix דיק- -dik to the infinitive.
However, strong verbs form the past participle with -גע ge- and ן- -n, usually accompanied by a vowel change, e. g. געהאָלפֿן geholfn 'helped' from the stem -העלפֿ helf- 'help'.
The following table shows some additional irregular past participles: Like German, Yiddish has a family of separable verbs.
In these, the uninflected particle, often a loanword from Hebrew, carries the main meaning, and it is accompanied by an inflected light verb.
The future tense in Yiddish is formed with a special auxiliary verb וועלן veln followed by the infinitive.
When the context makes the previousness of action clear, the ordinary past or future is used instead, and usually with an adverb such as שוין shoyn (already) or פֿריִער friër (earlier).
The auxiliary verb פֿלעגן (flegn), in combination with the infinitive (or participle, in some dialects), is used to form a habitual past aspect: for example, איך פֿלעג קומען ikh fleg kumen (I used to come).
Examples: זי האָט אים געטאָן אַ כאַפּ אָן zi hot im geton a khap on ('she gave him a grab on'); מיר גיבן אַ שרײַ אויס mir gibn a shray oys ('we give a scream out').
For example, the verb לײענען leyenen 'read' may be made perfective with the separable particle איבער iber or דורך durkh.
Further examples: The most common perfectivizing elements are the particles דורך ,איבער ,אָן ,אָפּ ,אויס (oys, op, on, iber, durkh) and the prefixes דער־ and צו־ (der-, tsu-), but there are no definitive rules for determining which of these are used with which verbs.
Yiddish allows and often requires double negation: קיינער איז דאָרטן נישט געווען keyner iz dortn nisht geven (literally: 'No one was not there') or איך האָב קיינעם נישט געזען ikh hob keynem nisht gezen (literally: 'I didn't see no one').
[12] However, verb-initial word order may be used to indicate a causal or other close contextual relationship between consecutive sentences, with a meaning similar to English so.
The Northern or so-called Lithuanian dialect of Yiddish from the Baltic countries and Belarus is notable, among a number of other peculiarities, for its lack of the neuter gender and the simplified case system.
Only two cases, nominative and accusative or oblique, exist in the Northern Yiddish, except for a few isolated remnants of the dative.
Deys, like dos (from which it is likely derived, and blended with di) when functioning as a pronoun, is used only for non-human subject nouns.
In casual usage of Hasidic Yiddish, especially in spoken form, the definite articles der, di, and dos often appear to have shifted to a more general single definite article de in the nominative, accusative, and dative cases, for both singular and plural, mirroring English the, complemented by the demonstrative determiners de, deys, and deye.
Newer Hasidic Yiddish publications show greater variance among their writers, some of whom show adherence to standard Yiddish orthographic styles and conventions, while others do not, suggesting that editorial guidelines focus largely on content and article structure, and don't have strong style preferences.
A more accurate observation is that Hasidic communities show less concern for grammatical rules — neither for Yiddish nor for the widely-used scholastic Hebrew (nor, for that matter, for English).
This could be due to a vestigial aversion to the study of grammar, or dikduk, within ordinary educational curricula, originally a reaction to the 19th century Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, which sought to increase grammatical knowledge and standards for both Yiddish and Hebrew.
Another possible cause for grammatical standards that differ somewhat from conventional academic Yiddish is the tendency among Hasidim towards autodidactism in adulthood, as the educational emphasis for children and adolescents is largely on religious studies, especially for boys, who tend to be more Yiddish-speaking than girls.