Documenting Poland’s Heritage Languages: The Challenge of

Polish Yiddish

Michael Hornsby (with Tomasz Wicherkiewicz)Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Lublin, Poland

Documenting the languages of the Second Polish Commonwealth:

Docelowy repertuar zagrożonych języków obejmować ma bazy danych dotyczących odmian używanych przez wspólnoty komunikatywne Rzeczypospolitej, a charakteryzujących się znacznym stopniem zagrożenia wymarciem

Characteristics of selected languages :

• Endangerment• Communicative• High probability of extinction

(Wicherkiewicz 2011)

1922

• The Commonwealth bordered Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Free City of Danzig, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and the Soviet Union, plus a tiny strip of the coastline of the Baltic Sea, around the city of Gdynia

• An area of 388,634 km² (sixth largest in Europe)

• 27.2 million inhabitants

1939

• 35.1 million inhabitants. Almost a third of these were of minority groups: 13.9 m

Lukowski, Jerzy, and Hubert Zawadzki. A Concise History of Poland. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Page 224

• dialekty i odmiany języka jidysz• dialekty litewskie• dialekty łatgalskie• dialekty białoruskie• dialekty ukraińskie• przejściowe dialekty polsko-

białorusko-ukraińskie i poleskie• rosyjskie dialekty staroobrzędowców• dialekty łemkowskie• dialekty spisko-magurskie i orawskie,• dialekty laskie• czeski dialekt Zelowa i Kucowa, oraz

dialekty czeskie Kotliny Kłodzkiej• niemieckie dialekty wyspowe – Bielitz-

Bialaer Sprachinsel• dialekty dolnoniemieckie (w tym dialekt

menonitów)• dialekty romani• dialekty karaimskie

Varieties of YiddishDialects of LithuanianLatgalian dialectsBelarusian dialectsDialects of Ukrainian‘Kresy’ (border) dialectsRussian Oldbeliever dialectsLemko dialectsDialects of Spis-Magura and OravaLach dialectsCzech dialects of Zelowa and Kucowa and of Kotlina Kłodzka Germanic varieties of Wilamowice and HałcnówLow German dialects (including Mennonites)Roma dialectsKaraite dialects

What challenges are involved in the documentation of Yiddish?

1. Which Yiddish?2. Selection of texts3. Selection of speakers

Cagé (2007)

Which texts to use?• Wide range of texts• RP had the choice of which text(s) to read

Which speakers?

What speakers might we have expected to find? (Grineveld & Bert 2011)

1. Fluent speaker 3 (+ ≈ 10)2. Semi-speaker -3. Terminal speaker 14. Remembers -5. Ghost speakers -6. Neo-speaker . . .7. Last speaker -

(Territorial speaker) 2

Some issues

• Tensions of standardization

Multilingual speakers

• Polylanguaging/translanguaging

Polylanguaging/translanguaging

• It is increasingly acknowledged by sociolinguists that “languages” as separate bounded groups of features is an idea which does not represent or describe real language use (Makoni and Pennycook 2006, Heller 2007, Jørgensen 2008; Jørgensen et al 2011).

• ‘Translanguaging’ or ‘polylanguaging’ is the phenomenon that speakers employ linguistic resources at their disposal which are associated with different ‘languages’, including the cases in which the speakers know only few features associated with a given ‘language’ (Møller 2008, Jørgensen 2010).

• Yiddish, English, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian.

Fragmentation/authentication

• Authenticity

For speakers of minority languages, a standardized form of the language is not ‘authentic’ (‘Klal Yiddish sounds too German’); cf. “linguistic mundaneness” (Bucholtz 2003: 405)

• Authentication

It is the tactic of authentication that produces authenticity as its effect. Thus sociolinguists should speak not of authenticity but more accurately of authenticity effects, achieved through the authenticating practices of those who use and evaluate language … authenticity is always achieved rather than given in social life, although this achievement is often rendered invisible (Bucholtz 2003: 410)

Fragmentation

• FragmentationMinority languages resist attempts at

standardization which more prestigious, more widely spoken languages do not (cf. accents in Polish and in English).Deacon (1996: 93): attributes of postmodernity include the ‘growing perception of fragmentation, particularity, difference and contingency’.

ConclusionsThe particular problems of the Yiddish strand of the project:

1. Demographics – sheer loss of numbers2. Locations – speakers of pre-war varieties of Yiddish are

now unlikely to be found in Poland (cf. response of one ‘gatekeeper’ in London, July 2012)

3. Dialect vs. standard Yiddish4. Who is a ‘good’ enough speaker? (researcher

ideologies; RP ideologies)

Some wider issues:

Majority/minority dichotomy – when we find a Yiddish speaker, we also find a Russian, English, Polish, Romanian, etc, speaker. PLURILINGUALISM (cf. recording issues).

‘Authentic’ language – this seems to be contested on a regular basis (RP responses).

References

Bucholtz, Mary. 2003. Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7:3, 398‐416.

Cagé, Christophe. 2007. Carte des dialectes Yiddish entre le XVe et le XIXe siècle / Map of Yiddish dialects between XVth and XIXth century. Inspiré de Histoire Universelle des Juifs, Hachette, 1992, page 193. Available online at

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Yiddish.png (accessed 04 August 2012).

Dean, Bernard. 1996. Language revival and language debate. Modernity and postmodernity. Cornish Studies 4. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 88-106.

Grineveld, Colette & Michel Bert. 2011. Speakers and communities. In Austin, Peter K. & Julia Sallabank (eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 45-65.

Heller, M. 2007. Bilingualism: a social approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Jørgensen, N. 2008. Polylingual languaging around and among children and

adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism 5(3), 161–176.Jørgensen, J. N. 2010. Languaging. Nine years of poylingual development of

Turkish-Danish grade school students, vol. 1-2. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, the Køge Series, vol. K15-K16.

Jørgensen, J. N., M. S. Karrebæk, L. M. Madsen, J. S. Møller. 2011. Polylanguaging in Superdiversity. In: Diversities Journal Fall

2011, 32-54.Lukowski, Jerzy, and Hubert Zawadzki. 2006. A Concise History of

Poland. New York: Cambridge University Press.Makoni, S. & A. Pennycook 2007. Disinventing and reconstituting

languages. In S.Makoni & A. Pennycook (eds.). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1–41.

Møller, J. 2008. Polylingual performance among Turkish-Danes in Late-Modern Copenhagen. International Journal of Multilingualism 5 (3), 217–236.