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You Have Schmutz on Your Punim!

Yiddish influence on the English language. · Dec 2025

Introduction

“Come here bubala, you have schmutz on your punim!” Growing up, nothing about this utterance would have seemed noteworthy to me. Yiddish-isms reverberated through my household, indistinguishable—at least to me—from normal English. My Jewish brother and father used them. My secular stepfather, who was raised on a farm in rural Iowa and didn’t meet a Jewish person until college, used them. Even my Jamaican nanny, who was raised in Kingston and spoke only Patois on the phone, let a “stop kvetching!” fly every so often, hurtling out of her mouth with a thick Jamaican accent and (much deserved) consternation at her little pickney (me).

Although I wouldn’t realize it until later on, the Yiddish words, phrases, and mannerisms that I identified as the sounds of my childhood could be traced back to my mother, who in turn had learned them from her mother, Omi. In 1937, Omi was born to a Jewish family in the primarily Jewish neighborhood of Leopoldstadt in Vienna. There, while German was the primary language, Yiddish was used widely among immigrant Jewish populations, including Omi’s family. When, in 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, Omi’s family made the prudent decision to send her, her sister, and her mother to safety in America. Bringing nothing but the clothes on their back and the language of their ancestors, they arrived at Ellis Island to join the millions of Jews and Yiddish speakers that already permeated pre-war New York City.

Today, Omi adamantly claims that she speaks no Yiddish, but you would only need to spend a couple of hours with her to know that she’s not telling the full story. She incessantly spouts Yiddishisms, regardless of the topic of conversation; she’s always delighted to recall memories of Vienna and childhood, her accounts, of course, replete with full Yiddish sentences; and, if you ask her to translate Yiddish, she’ll politely object, reminding you that she only knew it as a young girl, before flawlessly relaying the message. She, undoubtedly, is the nexus of Yiddish for my family and everyone who is lucky enough to encounter her.

My family’s Yiddish history is dear to me, but it is far from an isolated case. Countless American Jewish families speak an English suffused with Yiddish influence, traceable back through their genealogy to a Jewish emigree. But, strikingly, direct descendants of native Yiddish speakers are not the only ones who exhibit features in their day-to-day language. Non-Jewish friends and family, street passerby, advertisements, even people who have never encountered a Jewish person in their lives: Yiddish has irreversibly woven itself into the fabric of American English. But how did this previously esoteric language, steeped in religious undertones, come to form such a bedrock part of our everyday prose? In what ways, obvious and obscure, has Yiddish influenced the way we speak? How prevalent is this phenomenon truly? How will Yiddish continue to shape our linguistic landscape, if at all? This paper seeks to answer these questions and more. I will begin by mapping the historical formation of Yiddish, up until its arrival in the United States. I will then elucidate the primary elements of the language that have seeped into American English, before discussing a framework for modeling the mechanisms that enabled the diffusion of Yiddish, but not other immigrant languages. Finally, I will conclude by projecting a future for Yiddish and its place in the English language.

A Brief History of Yiddish

Although theoretical debates continue, the dominant traditional theory regarding the formation of Yiddish is the Rhineland Hypothesis, championed by Max Weinreich. According to this view, Yiddish emerged in the ninth and tenth centuries in the Rhine River Valley (specifically the cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz) when Jews from today’s southern France and northern Italy migrated in search of economic prosperity. They carried with them Laaz, a special dialect of local romance languages that Jews had adopted to function societally with people outside of their religious community. Along with Laaz, they also spoke biblical/Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic, sacred languages that had been used for religious rites and interpretation for centuries. Upon arrival in the Rhine Valley, the Jews adapted once again to learn local Middle High German dialects, for the purpose of engaging with their new peers. However, Jewish communities tended to be insular, leading to the creation of a unique, Jewish-marked modification of the lingua franca, with elements coming from all aspects of their background, both in the Rhine Valley and later on in the diaspora. Laaz, while more or less abandoned due to no pre-existing speakers in the new land, continued to act as a substratum—the linguistic foundation that is overtaken by another language, but maintains influence—along with the Hebrew and Aramaic that Jewish men still used on a daily basis while practicing Judaism. These languages fused to create what is considered to be the first iteration of Yiddish 1 2.

Not long after settling in the Rhine Valley, the Crusades pushed the Jewish people east, where they settled for sporadic amounts of time until ultimately reaching the Slavic-speaking territories (what is now Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus) in the 13th century. This shift separated Yiddish into two distinct branches: Eastern Yiddish and Western Yiddish, the latter of which remained in German-speaking lands and eventually declined due to decreolization and assimilation. Meanwhile, Eastern Yiddish flourished, enjoying strong exchange with local languages and appropriating many of their features as its own 3.

The period of prosperity for Eastern Yiddish in Europe began its decline during the 1880s, when a series of thousands of anti-semitic pogroms across multiple countries killed thousands of Jews and made refugees of the rest. Of the 2.5 million Jews who fled Europe, two million came to America, almost all of whom set their roots in New York City, creating enclaves specifically in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn. This movement was accelerated by the beginning of the Second World War and the Holocaust, which saw even more Eastern European Jews migrating to America for safety. The formation of these thriving Jewish communities marks the beginning of Yiddish’s influence on the English language. Keeping with the trend, Jewish immigrants adopted the language endemic to their new locale—English—while maintaining their heritage languages, Yiddish and Hebrew. Just as Yiddish was formed by amalgamating the diasporic languages of the Jewish people, it soon began to replicate the process here in America 4.

Yiddish Elements

How exactly has Yiddish impacted how we speak? Some ways are more obvious and common than others, but it has unequivocally made its mark on ordinary American English. A necessary side note here is that just because a feature is mentioned does not necessarily mean that every English speaker in America will exhibit, or even understand, it. There is extreme variation in the prevalence of the following elements, but each is used by non-Yiddish speakers in some capacity while communicating in English.

The most widespread and identifiable manner by which Yiddish has infiltrated American English is through loan words, words adopted from one language by another with little to no translation and (supposedly) maintained pronunciation. To determine which Yiddish words made the cut, researcher Julia Schultz completed a 2018 comprehensive lexicographical sample of the Oxford English Dictionary Online and the electronic form of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, the results of which found a total of 290 loan words labeled as having originated from Yiddish. Some of these would be almost completely unrecognizable to most people, such as shalach monos (a holiday tradition during Purim when food and gifts are exchanged) or balagan (a state of chaotic disarray), but they are present, localized entirely in religious Jewish communities 5. On the other hand, there are some that are almost universally recognized. In a seminal 2008 poll, linguist Sarah Bunin Benor found that klutz (a clumsy person) and shpiel (a long, exaggerated story) are the only two loan words that are used by over 50% of the general American population, with kvetch (to complain) and schmutz (dirt or unwanted stain) just barely missing the mark6. Only 1% of respondents had never heard klutz, and the majority were not aware of its Yiddish roots 7.

Some loan words also undergo meaning changes when they enter English. A notable example is the term chutzpah, which, originally in Yiddish, has a negative sense (meaning the audacity to do something uncouth), but took on an additional positive sense (meaning the “guts” to do something daunting) when it was adopted into English. Both of these are popular on a large scale, as shown by the Washington Examiner’s 2013 “Chutzpah Awards” (negative) and Oprah Winfrey’s 2004 “Chutzpah Awards” (positive). Similarly, schmooze can mean both “chat” (positive, original sense) and “kiss up” (negative, new sense). As somewhat expected, Jews are more likely to use the original sense of the word, whereas non-Jews are more likely to use the modified meaning 8.

There is some difficulty in determining the exact origin of many words that are considered Yiddish in etymology, given the unusual nature of the language’s development. Because Yiddish picked up so many features from other languages during its migration East through Europe, and these also exist as immigrant languages in America, it cannot always be said with certainty that such words were adopted from Yiddish, as opposed to their language of origin. For example, the popular computer term glitch, used to refer to errors or malfunctions in a program, was first noted as technical jargon among engineers to describe a sudden signal error or voltage spike. However, there is debate as to whether it was introduced by Jewish-American engineers using a Yiddishism (glitsh, meaning "a slippery place" or "a skid") or German-American engineers using the standard German verb (glitschen, meaning "to slip"). Because of Yiddish’s German roots, the phonology is nearly identical, making the specific path of transmission historically opaque 9. This is the case for various terms.

A final note on loan words is the idiosyncrasy of romanization. Yiddish is originally written using the Hebrew alphabet, primarily an abjad, meaning vowels are usually not written and are left to be inferred by the reader. This leads to debate and confusion when Yiddish words are romanized, or transliterated into the Latin alphabet, so to be pronounceable by English speakers (one need not look further than the well-known Jewish holiday: khanuka, hanuka, hanukah, chanuka, chanukah). The origin of how the majority of Yiddish words are romanized today can be traced back to the Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah, and the death of Western Yiddish in Germany. In the 1770s, reformers mistakenly believed that Yiddish was a “corrupted” Modern German that prevented Jews from integrating into mainstream society. Because of this, there were strong movements to promote the German language in favor of Yiddish, resulting in German being considered a sign of education in Jewish communities. This also had the effect of leading Jews to spell Yiddish words as though they were German. This carried over into transliteration, where, when romanizing the שׁ, the German spelling of /sch/ was favored over the simpler /sh/ sound. /Sh/ being one of the most popular phonemes in the Yiddish language, Germanic romanization is evident in many of the popular loan words used in English, but alternative spellings can evince other factors about the author 10.

Adjacent to loan words are calques, another standard feature of Yiddish in English. The most common form of Yiddish calques is idiomatic: phrases that, instead of keeping the initial pronunciation, are translated word-by-word or root-by-root. These are less prevalent than loan words and less identifiable as Yiddish, given their English perception. The most common idiomatic calques include “Enough already!” (Genug shoyn), “I need it like a hole in the head” (Ich darf es vi a loch in kop), “Go figure” (Gey veys), and even the term “bottom line” (Di untershte shure), which lexicographer Sol Steinmetz argues entered English via the Yiddish phrase that refers to the final summation in Talmudic argumentation or business logic 11. Another form of calque is syntactic, involving translating Yiddish grammatical structures or preposition usage into English, often violating standard English syntax. A prime example of this is saying that something is “by [someone]” to indicate opinion. This manifests usually as “It’s fine by me” or “Is that alright by you?”. In standard English, one would typically use "with me" or "to me." The usage of "by" to denote "in my opinion" or "from my perspective" is a direct interference from the Yiddish preposition bay mir (at/by me) 12. Other examples of this include “knowing from” something (visn fun) and “wise [person]” (usually “wise guy”, khokhem) 13. A common but debated Yiddish calque is of the pragmatic variety: the use of the phrase “Enjoy!” as an imperative. Historically, "enjoy" in English was a transitive verb requiring an object ("Enjoy your meal"), but the absolute use of "Enjoy!" as a standalone command is attributed to Yiddish bilinguals transferring the usage of hot hana'e 14.

In addition to loan words and calques, some elements of Yiddish morphology (how words are constructed using prefixes, roots, and suffixes) are also pervasive in English. Perhaps most commonly and comedically is “shm-reduplication”, where the word is repeated with the prefix shm- to indicate irony, skepticism, or lack of importance. This feature is originally from Yiddish gelt shmelt, literally meaning “money-schmoney”, but the morphological practice has generalized and can be applied to most nouns ("Baby-shmaby, he's six years old!") and adjectives (“Well isn’t that fancy-schmancy”). While seemingly simple, a set of complex phonological properties underlie shm-reduplication, including rules about words beginning with a consonant cluster, vowel-initial words, words that already begin with shm-, and more 15. Another morphological feature is the -nik suffix. -Nik is used to describe a person related to the word to which the suffix is attached, for example, “peacenik” is someone who is known for being a strong advocate for peace. While this was introduced to English from Yiddish, it was not popularized until the groundbreaking Soviet Union launch of the Sputnik satellite and the creation of the Beatnik movement 16.

There exists a long list of other elements of Yiddish that have entered English in some sens; however, these are less common and are usually concentrated within Jewish circles, especially Orthodox enclaves. The origin and existence of these in the greater English vernacular is debated, and for that reason, they are not as well understood. Some such features include “Yiddish-movement”, a type of topicalization where the object of a sentence is moved to the front for emphasis (“Such a nice watch he has”), clause structure transfer (“I want that you should see this”), tense transfer (“I'm living here 10 years already”), and various prepositional transfers ("What do we learn out from this?").

Modes of Diffusion

To uncover the complex mechanism by which Yiddish began to spread from its provincial communities to the greater NYC metro and eventually the entire country, it is first important to establish Yiddish as a Jewish language. Yiddish was, from its inception, an inherently Jewish language. It developed out of necessity—the private need for Jews to have an alternative to Hebrew and Aramaic, which were reserved for liturgical practices, and the public need for Jews to work, trade, and live with their local community. Historically, it has been Jewish communities, and only Jewish communities, who have spoken Yiddish. Accordingly, when Yiddish came to America, it did not sail across the sea, live in a tenement, and start a business on its own: it did so through the Jewish people who spoke it. Judaism is inextricable from Yiddish, and as such, the evolution of Yiddish must be analyzed through a Jewish perspective. A large amount of scholarship on Yiddish in America uses the expansion and position of Jews as a proxy to study parallel aspects of Yiddish, given the underlying connection between the two. This is not to erase the diversity of Jewish language, as there exist factions of American Jews who have little Yiddish influence in their vernacular or speak Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, or another uniquely Jewish language. Regardless, Yiddish was the original language of the vast majority of Jews when they came to America. Their dynamic interplay between Yiddish and English continued to evolve, leading researchers today to believe that the linguistic behavior of American Jews constitutes a systematic, Yiddish-based ethnolect that functions similarly to Jewish languages of the past 17.

On a basic level, language apprehension is directly related to exposure. The more one observes a word or grammatical construction, the more likely they are to use it themselves. In her academic review “Pastrami, Verklempt, and Tshootspa: Non-Jews’ Use of Jewish Language in the United States”, Benor posits four primary mechanisms of diffusion: social networks, media, commodification, and metalinguistic discourse. She elaborates that none of these functions operates in a vacuum, each overlapping in influence with the other 18. Each of the four mechanisms works by increasing Yiddish-influenced language exposure to groups that were not privy to it before.

The first mechanism, social networks, is the most primitive. It states that the amount and proximity of one’s connection to Jews correlates positively with likely they are to use Yiddish-influenced English. The chain of influence begins with the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who came to America between 1880 and 1920. These Jews became bilingual in English and began to infuse the aforementioned aspects of Yiddish (loan words, calques, and morphology) in the English they spoke with family, friends, and strangers. While certain features came and went, Yiddish influence was passed down through generations, continuing to expand to all those who came in contact with Jewish lineage. According to Benor, having Jewish friends is the largest factor in non-Jews’ use of Yiddish features, illustrated by the correlation between the amount of Jewish friends and frequency of Yiddish words used. Other important social factors that correlate with the use of Yiddish words include, in order of strength, the number of Jewish high school friends, the number of Jewish co-workers, whether they have lived in New York, and the amount of time they have spent in Israel. Interestingly, sexual orientation is also a factor. Gays and bisexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to use Yiddish words, with women having a particular affinity for spiel, and men for mazel tov. While this may seem reducible to intervening factors, regression analysis shows it is a strong independent variable, Benor surmising that it could be related to the intersection between queer culture and Yiddish 19. Intuitively, Benor also shows that the type of social relationship with the Jewish transmitter will change the elements of Yiddish that are adopted. For example, non-Jews who marry into Jewish families will use more familial terms, such as holidays, meals, and body parts, even going as far as to reclaim previously pejorative terms such as shiksa (a derogatory term for a woman who is not Jewish). Similarly, people who work with Jews will pick up more Yiddish terms related to their line of work, and children who attend Jewish schools will come back with Yiddish phrases related to education and other matters of playground discussion.

The second mechanism by which Yiddish spread is through the media, the most influential being pop culture. Jews have played a large role in shaping the cultural landscape since they arrived in America, beginning with “dialect comedy”. These immensely popular anti-semitic performances were often put on by non-Jews, mocking Yiddish immigrants’ grammar, pronunciation, and intonation, with Jewish actors in the following decades transforming the genre into self-deprecation and injecting Yiddish lexicon into their equally anti-semitic performances. Thus began the association between Yiddish and humor 20. While Jews continued to be the subject of pop culture, it was not until the 1960s and the release of Fiddler on the Roof that audiences truly began to adopt the Yiddish they heard being performed. This coincided with the peak of the Borscht Belt, a region of resorts in the Catskills of New York popular with Jews and hosts of famous Jewish comedians of the time. These platforms paved the way for the proliferation of Jewish writers in Hollywood—at one point in the 1980s, 80% of professional comedians and over half of TV writers in America were Jews 21. Yiddish has cemented itself as an institution within comedy and film, so much so that non-Jewish comedians and actors sometimes invoke Yiddish words and accents for comedic effect. Some even claim that the popularity of shm-reduplication was borne of the association between Yiddish words and humor, given the prevalence of the ‘shm’ sound in Yiddish words that are considered especially funny, such as schmo (a stupid person), schlong (penis), and schmuck (a contemptible person). On top of pop culture, other Jews in the media include journalism, where Yiddish words can be found in articles of newspapers in towns that have little to no Jew population; literature, which contributed to the acceptance of Yiddish words in more intellectual contexts; and politics, where politicians use Yiddish to signal their solidarity with Jews, while at the same time exposing Yiddishisms to unwitting non-Jewish audiences 22.

When it comes to the third mechanism, commodification, nothing has had a greater impact than food. Perhaps one of the most endearing and pervasive contributions from Jewish immigrants is the bagel (beygl), but their cooking does not stop there, with pastrami, knishes, bialys, and lox all having Yiddish origins. While food names are easy to pick up, these products have also had the reverberating effect of being marketed with other, lesser-known Yiddishisms. For example, Einstein Bros. Bagels, a national bagel chain, sells their spreads not as cream cheeses, but as “shmears”. Yiddish has also been commodified by using its phrases for product names, descriptions, and advertisements: a notable example of this is maven, which 159 US companies have registered as part of their business name, another being the use of Yiddishisms by apparently non-Yiddish people in advertisements for Jewish commodities, broadening the appeal of the product and inadvertently the Yiddish elements along with it 23.

The fourth and final mechanism is metalinguistic discourse. This includes media such as articles, novels, and documentaries written about Yiddish, from both a controversy and an appreciation standpoint. However, the most salient aspect of metalinguistic discourse is anti-semitic rhetoric, where Yiddish elements, including words, pronunciation, and accent, are turned against Jews in hateful messaging. A primary example of this is “Oy vey, it’s like anuddah Shoah!”, a commonly used phrase that suggests Jews overly remember the Holocaust. Not only does it use a Yiddish phrase, oy vey, but the change from /th/ to /d/ is an attempt to mock the Yiddish accent. This is also apparent in another anti-semitic phrase, “Oy vey, da Goyim know! Shut it down!”, which references the trope of a Jewish cabal or world order. Other efforts to ridicule Yiddish phonology include /t/ release, /r/ deletion, New York vowels, and overly nasalized words. The term goyim (non-Jewish person) specifically has been a prominent anti-semitic appropriation of Yiddish, with antisemites asserting that they are “reclaiming” what they believe to be a derogatory term against them, akin to how other marginalized groups have reclaimed their slurs. Anti-semitic employment of Yiddish is an unfortunate example of Yiddish’s prevalence in American English, and it has had the regrettable quality of expanding, both inside these prejudiced communities and as a focus of metalinguistic discussion 24.

Having established the four primary mechanisms by which Yiddish has expanded, a natural question is why Yiddish is more prevalent than other immigrant languages. The four mechanisms discussed by Benor satisfy the condition of the diffusion of Yiddish, yet do not tell us exactly what makes Yiddish special—any other major immigrant language could more or less fit the same account. In fact, it seems likely that other languages would have more of an impact than Yiddish, given that even at its peak, it was only the third largest immigrant language in America, behind Italian with 300,000 more speakers in 1910. Even today, there are about 41,000,000 Spanish speakers in America, about forty times as many Yiddish speakers 25. Yet, despite this, Yiddish has an outsize influence on not only the American English lexicon, but also grammar.

One explanation for this phenomenon is that Yiddish loanwords survived because they filled specific "lexical gaps" in English, particularly regarding human character and psychological states. Unlike other immigrant language loans, which often denoted concrete objects such as food or cultural items, Yiddish offered a vocabulary for nuance, irony, and fatalism that English lacked 26. That said, while this explanation accounts for the increased likelihood that an emotive Yiddish word would become popular as opposed to English counterparts, it does not account for why a Yiddish word was chosen instead of, say, an emotive Italian one. It would be naive to claim that Yiddish is simply a more colorful language, ignoring the semantic complexity of other languages.

A more likely explanation is the shared roots between Yiddish and English. Both languages are members of the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, meaning they share a number of linguistic characteristics that ease the appropriation process. This is opposed to other dominant immigrant languages such as Italian and Spanish, which are from the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. Morphological compatibility is a key feature of the relationship between Yiddish and English, and because they share a fundamental Germanic grammar, Yiddish verbs can be instantly conjugated using English rules without sounding discordant. For example, one can take the Yiddish word schmooze and immediately adopt it with English morphology to say they schmoozed in the past or are schmoozing in the present, whereas it is not as natural to say that one siesta-ed (napped). This familiarity and simple adaptation process lowers the threshold for adaptation 27.

In addition to morphological compatibility, a shared linguistic lineage means that Yiddish words have phonotactic familiarity to English speakers, or, in other words, English speakers possess an intuitive familiarity with Yiddish sounds because the two languages share words with a common ancestor. So, even if an English speaker doesn't know a specific Yiddish word, the sound of the word often conforms to English phonological rules or resembles a native English word, such as Yiddish shvits and English sweat, which are, in fact, cognates. This subconscious recognition allows easier entry for Yiddishisms, while at the same time prohibiting entry for languages from more distinct backgrounds 28. Spanish and Italian have more visible foreign phonology and spelling (jalapeño, piñata, prosciutto, gnocchi) which keeps them as marked cultural tokens rather than undercover slang. Essentially, Yiddish words can pass for “funny-sounding English” in a way that Romance loans usually cannot.

The Future of Yiddish Influence

Up until I came to college, I never characterized the Yiddish in my life as remnants of a foreign language. I had never heard anyone outside of my immediate circle use it (not surprising in Kentucky), so I chalked it up to just an idiosyncratic, private language my family had with one another. Inevitably, this worldview was dismantled with my arrival in the thriving Jewish community that is Columbia/Barnard. I slowly realized that these words were not just infantilizing jargon my mother had fabricated, but they were actually relics of my family and Jewish history. Yiddish is now a larger part of the fabric of my daily life than ever before. As I walk through the halls of Columbia and the streets of New York, I am bombarded with Yiddishisms—some familiar, some never heard before. Living and studying in the epicenter of the global Jewish life, I have never felt more connected to my Yiddish heritage. But is Yiddish really as thriving as it seems to be? What does the future hold for the historically persecuted language?

Benor briefly discusses age as a factor that correlates with non-Jews’ knowledge and use of Yiddish words. She finds in her study that knowledge and use of many Yiddish words, such as heimish or macher, is diminishing among both Jews and non-Jews, with the trend beginning in people born after 1965 and experiencing the largest drop off in the age groups born after 1986. Meanwhile, she shows that other Yiddish words demonstrate curvilinear patterns when analyzed by use and knowledge through age. Words like shmutz were self-reported to be most prevalent among people in the 55-64 age group, suggesting their peak popularity among the formative language years for that age group, in the 1960s-80s, which lines up with her framework for diffusion. In terms of the non-loan word appropriations, such as in syntax and morphology, Benor finds that these are also reducing in recognizability in younger age groups. That is, all except for shm-reduplication, which is recognized at a high level by all age groups but is more likely to be employed by younger generations 29. This illustrates a possibly concerning trend towards Yiddish influence falling out of popularity with non-Jewish populations as features age without robust replacement. While further research into this phenomenon is needed, it rings true with Jewish population dynamics. If contact with Jewish people is truly the strongest indicator for the adoption of Yiddishisms, and the Jewish population progressively has decreased proportionally to the U.S. general population, then it would make sense that Yiddish has become relatively less prevalent over time 30.

In the interest of doing my own (casual) research, I compiled a list of the 10 most popular Yiddish loanwords (bagel, chutzpah, glitch, klutz, nosh, schlep, schmooze, schmuck, shtick, spiel), and entered them into Google N-Gram Viewer, an online program that charts the frequencies of any word using a yearly count of element strings found in printed sources published between 1500 and 2022. After entering my list of words, I restricted the date range to after 1880 and specified the “American English” corpus. As a disclaimer, I have no background in data analysis, but the graph it created shows a striking upward trend of use for these words (Fig. 1). Compelled to continue (albeit in a non-scientifically rigorous manner), I did the same for a random selection of Yiddish loan words I had never encountered before, presumably more popular historically or with more observant Jews (balabusta, fleishig, milchig, nebbish, pisher, schmutter, schav, shegetz, vigorish, yekke) (Fig. 2). I did not notice as obvious of a trend, however, there does seem to be a noticeable pattern in some words such as pisher and vigorish, with a historical peak and subsequent downturn. That being said, the majority of the words were so rare in the American English corpus that it was difficult to discern any movement whatsoever. While this non-rigorous approach seems to provide at least a slightly different story than that presented by Benor, it has a couple of additional drawbacks. Firstly, printed sources are not necessarily a perfect indicator for the actual speech of Americans, and the nature of the corpus puts disproportionate weight on quantity—that is to say, someone publishing a book or even an article about a single word could skew the results, especially with words that are already uncommon. Secondly, as previously mentioned, there is strong variation in Yiddish spellings, a nuance which this approach does not account for.

At the same time, there seems to be indicators that Yiddish influence has increased in some groups, most notably non-Orthodox Jews. In his work Adventures in Yiddishland, Jeffrey Shandler defines Yiddish today as a “post-vernacular” language, meaning the symbolic value of the language supersedes its communicative utility. He argues that American Jews use Yiddishisms consciously or subconsciously as a signal of their in-group Jewishness, performing their cultural continuity and connection with Jewish history, food, and distinct social values. What exactly is being communicated in Yiddish is not the semantic value of the words themselves; rather, it's the underlying association between Yiddish and identity. Anecdotally, I have noticed this on Columbia’s campus, with Jews from all backgrounds and political beliefs using Yiddish as a signpost to prove their Jewishness to both insiders and non-Jews. Some common examples I see are anti-capitalist Jewish groups using old Yiddish socialist posters to invoke the association between Judaism and social action, or Zionist Jews using Yiddish phrases, most of them unintelligible to their audience, to stir a sentiment of Jewish unity and initiative.

Conclusion

When Omi escaped Austria with her family, she was too young to realize how lucky she had been. The rest of her family, however, was not as fortuitous. For various reasons, they were unable or unwilling to leave, resulting in their capture by the Nazis. Omi’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, not to mention her friends and neighbors, were all sent to various internment camps around Europe. From these camps, her family regularly sent handwritten letters, in both Yiddish and German, across the ocean, documenting their daily lives and typical family dynamics, but also which relatives they had stopped receiving news from and how many people had mysteriously disappeared from the camp that day. Omi received letters for months, until one day they abruptly stopped. While it was later discovered that most of her family had been worked to death at the Terezín Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia, Omi did not know this at the time, and to her, the death of her family only meant the sudden cessation of the stream of Yiddish from the other side of the ocean.

Only a few weeks ago, at the age of 88, did Omi reclaim her Austrian identity. After I helped her through the bureaucratic process, Omi was finally able to receive the Austrian citizenship that she had been denied at a young age. This marked a symbolic acceptance and forgiveness of not only the country that had sold her and her family to the Nazis, but of Yiddish too, the language of Judaism, the language of her identity that had caused her ineffable amounts of grief and suffering.

As the original Yiddish-speaking immigrants begin to age and pass away, it is important to uphold Omi’s commitment to preserving the language of our Jewish ancestors, the words and grammar that persevered centuries of persecution, genocide, and agony. It is my responsibility as an American Jew to preserve, in any capacity, the language that tells my family history. It is because of this that I will never abandon my Yiddish-inflicted English. Regardless of the external trends, I will continue to use the Yiddish that has been passed down to me through generations of speakers, which in turn I will pass down to my own progeny.

Appendix

Figure 1

Figure 2

Sources Cited

Benor, Sarah Bunin. “Mensch, Bentsh, and Balagan: Variation in the American Jewish Linguistic Repertoire.” Language & Communication 31, no. 2 (2011): 141–154.

Benor, Sarah Bunin. “Do American Jews Speak a ‘Jewish Language’? A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness.” Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 2 (2009): 230–269.

Benor, Sarah Bunin. “Pastrami, Verklempt, and Tshootspa: Non-Jews’ Use of Jewish Language in the United States.” In American Jewish Year Book 2020, edited by Arnold Dashefsky and Ira M. Sheskin, 3–56. Cham: Springer, 2022.

Benor, Sarah Bunin, and Steven M. Cohen. Survey of American Jewish Language and Identity. Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, 2009.

Brook, Vincent. Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Burko, AL. “Yiddish-Slavic Language Contact and Its Linguistic Outcome.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2024.2386479.

Dorinson, Joseph. Kvetching and Shpritzing: Jewish Humor in American Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015.

Fishman, Joshua A. Yiddish: Turning to Life. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1991.

Gold, David L. “Traces of the Yiddish Substratum in the English of Ashkenazic Jews.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language (1981).

Kabakchi, V. V. “Of Sputniks, Beatniks, and Nogoodniks.” American Speech 65, no. 3 (1990): 254–267.

Nevins, Andrew, and Bert Vaux. “Metalinguistic, Shmetalinguistic: The Phonology of Shm-Reduplication.” In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. 2003. 702–721.

Pew Research Center. Jewish Americans in 2020. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, May 11, 2021.

Rumbaut, Rubén G., and Douglas S. Massey. “Immigration & Language Diversity in the United States.” Daedalus 142, no. 3 (2013): 141–154.

Schultz, Julia. “The Impact of Yiddish on the English Language: An Overview of Lexical Borrowing in the Variety of Subject Areas and Spheres of Life Influenced by Yiddish over Time.” English Today 35, no. 3 (2019): 2–7. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078418000494.

Schwartz, Jonathan H. “Why do so many Yiddish words in English have a German origin? The influence of Yiddish-German orthography on Forverts spelling.” Forward (Yiddish World), March 21, 2024.

Steinmetz, Sol. Yiddish & English: The Story of Yiddish in America. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2001.

Tannen, Deborah. “New York Jewish Conversational Style.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 30 (1981): 133–150.

Vespe, Jim. “It Was John Glenn Who Popularized the Word ‘Glitch.’” Air & Space Magazine, October 2019.

Weinreich, Max. History of the Yiddish Language. Translated by Shlomo Noble, with the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Weinreich, Uriel. Yiddish in America: Its History and Variation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Weinreich, Uriel. Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. The Hague: Mouton, 1969.

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Basic Facts about Yiddish. 2014. https://www.yivo.org/cimages/basic_facts_about_yiddish_2014.pdf.

Notes

  1. 1. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
  2. 2. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Basic Facts about Yiddish (2014), https://www.yivo.org/cimages/basic_facts_about_yiddish_2014.pdf.
  3. 3. AL Burko, “Yiddish-Slavic Language Contact and Its Linguistic Outcome,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (2024), https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2024.2386479
  4. 4. Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language
  5. 5. Julia Schultz, “The Impact of Yiddish on the English Language: An Overview of Lexical Borrowing in the Variety of Subject Areas and Spheres of Life Influenced by Yiddish over Time,” English Today 35, no. 3 (2019): 2–7, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078418000494.
  6. 6. Sarah Bunin Benor and Steven M. Cohen, Survey of American Jewish Language and Identity (Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, 2009)
  7. 7. Sarah Bunin Benor, “Mensch, Bentsh, and Balagan: Variation in the American Jewish Linguistic Repertoire,” Language & Communication 31, no. 2 (2011): 141–154.
  8. 8. Benor, “Mensch, Bentsh, and Balagan.”
  9. 9. Jim Vespe, “It Was John Glenn Who Popularized the Word ‘Glitch,’” Air & Space Magazine, October 2019.
  10. 10. Jonathan H. Schwartz, “Why do so many Yiddish words in English have a German origin? The influence of Yiddish-German orthography on Forverts spelling,” Forward (Yiddish World), March 21, 2024.
  11. 11. Uriel Weinreich, Yiddish in America: Its History and Variation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980)
  12. 12. Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems (The Hague: Mouton, 1969).
  13. 13. David L. Gold, “Traces of the Yiddish Substratum in the English of Ashkenazic Jews,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language (1981).
  14. 14. Deborah Tannen, “New York Jewish Conversational Style,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 30 (1981): 133–150.
  15. 15. Andrew Nevins and Bert Vaux, “Metalinguistic, Shmetalinguistic: The Phonology of Shm-Reduplication,” in Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (2003), 702–721.
  16. 16. V. V. Kabakchi, “Of Sputniks, Beatniks, and Nogoodniks,” American Speech 65, no. 3 (1990).
  17. 17. Sarah Bunin Benor, “Do American Jews Speak a ‘Jewish Language’? A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness,” Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 2 (2009): 230–69.
  18. 18. Sarah Bunin Benor, “Pastrami, Verklempt, and Tshootspa: Non-Jews’ Use of Jewish Language in the United States,” in American Jewish Year Book 2020, ed. Arnold Dashefsky and Ira M. Sheskin (Cham: Springer, 2022), 3–56.
  19. 19. Benor, Sarah Bunin, and Steven M. Cohen. 2009. Survey of American Jewish Language and Identity. Los Angeles: Hebrew Union College.
  20. 20. Joseph Dorinson, Kvetching and Shpritzing: Jewish Humor in American Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015).
  21. 21. Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).
  22. 22. Benor, “Pastrami, Verklempt, and Tshootspa.”
  23. 23. Benor, “Pastrami, Verklempt, and Tshootspa.”
  24. 24. Benor, “Pastrami, Verklempt, and Tshootspa.”
  25. 25. Rubén G. Rumbaut and Douglas S. Massey, “Immigration & Language Diversity in the United States,” Daedalus 142, no. 3 (2013): 141–154.
  26. 26. Joshua A. Fishman, Yiddish: Turning to Life (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1991).
  27. 27. Weinreich, Languages in Contact
  28. 28. Sol Steinmetz, Yiddish & English: The Story of Yiddish in America (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2001).
  29. 29. Benor, “Mensch, bentsh, and balagan.”
  30. 30. Pew Research Center, Jewish Americans in 2020 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, May 11, 2021).