THE PRONUNCIATION OF 'ARGENTINEAN STANDARD YIDDISH"

Modern Yiddish is usually divided into several subgroups: the Eastern European Yiddish dialects, divided at least into a Northern and a Southern variety, and the so-called 'Standard Yiddish' (= StY). I will not discuss in detail the problem of the standardization but I would like to point out that I plead for a differentiation into subgroups when talking about the phonetics of 'StY', for there are striking differences in pronun- ciation in the new Diaspora all over the world.

Modern 'Standard' Yiddish

Since the last century great efforts on standardizing modern Eastern Yiddish have been made, focussing on cross-dialectal vocabulary, grammar, and spelling enjoying a broad acceptance in the Yiddish- speaking community.2 Only the pronunciation still seems to be a bone of contention.3 Despite the demographic dominance of Southern Yiddish speakers, the higher prestige of the Northern Jewish communities in Eastern Europe caused the 'literary pronunciation' - in which the vowel system resembles very much the Lithuanian Yiddish dialect - to override all others. Its use in such prestigious functions as the language of schools and public discussion contributed to the acceptance of this supra-regio-

rd I This is an abstract of a paper given at the '3 Symposium for Yiddish Studies in Ger- many' (2000) in Yiddish: 'Argentiner Yidish un andere 'klal-yidishe' havores'. My investiga- tion of the phonetics of an Argentinean Standard Yiddish (AStY) as described in this short paper is still work in progress. My work on Argentinean Yiddish phonetics in general has barely begun.

2. For an overview of the history of StY, see lA. Fishman, ed., Never Say Die! A Thou- sand Years ofJewish Life and Letters. Contributions to the Sociology of Language, 30. The Hague etc. 1981. 3 The controversy discussion on StY is also reviewed in A. Kleine, 'Toward a "Standard Yiddish Pronunciation". An Instrumentally Aided Phonetic Analysis', in Monika S. Schmid e.a., eds, Historical Linguistics 1997: Selected Papers from the 13th lnternational Confer- ence on Historical Linguistics, Duesseldorf, 10-17 August 1997, Amsterdam 1998, 202f.

S. Berger, M. Brocke and 1. Zwiep (eds.), Zutot 2001,158-164. THE PRONUNCIATION OF 'ARGENTINEAN STANDARD YIDDISH"

nal variety already in Eastern Europe.4 Moreover the training of teachers took place mainly in Lithuania where the initiative of a secular school system was born. Another instance that encouraged a northern oriented StY was the YIVO, the 'Institute for Jewish Research' in Vilna (1925- 1941), which had been the home of many standardizing efforts, where several conventions (e.g. spelling conventions like the Takones fun yjdjshn oysleyg of 1937) were fixed. In the pre-war Eastern European Yiddish speaking centers with a dense Jewish population it was not vital for the linguistic community to level local differences. But in the overseas exile communities, no dynamism may fix a local variety. No cohesive hinterland sustains any 'original' dialect of the 'alter heym'. Thus today StY can no longer be considered a 'hypothetical' construct. It has become reality in the overseas exile communities, where dialectal multiplicity and mixture are one factor which supports a standard and where StY is taught as a foreign language in academic programmes. Therefore my analysis is based on phonological descriptions drawn from widespread textbooks.5 These rules allow me to distinguish speakers of the' klal-shprakh', the standard language, from those of dialectal varieties of the Eastern Yiddish language.

Exile varieties of the so-called 'Standard Yiddish'

Why focus on Argentinean Standard? There is no linguistic reason to favour the Argentinean variety over others, such as the US-Standard, the Australian, the South-African etc. But it is clear that it does not make sense to analyze for example the pronunciation of 'Standard English' using data from an educated CNN TV-speaker, his British counterpart at the BBC and their fellows in Sydney and Toronto. This is also clear for the varieties of 'Standard German' in Germany, Austria and German speaking Switzerland. The same holds true for the 'StY' varieties spread all over the world with important centres in the USA, Canada, Australia,

4 See]. Mark, 'Vegn a klasishn aroysreyd' (On the standard pronounciation of Yiddish),

Yidishe sprakh ILl (1951) 7ff. 5 U. Weinreich, College Yiddish. An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to Jewish Life and Culture. With a preface by Roman Jakobson, 6th Printing, 4th revised edition, New York 1965; id. Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary, New York 1968; D. Katz, Grammar of the Yiddish Language, London 1987.

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