This report concerns the Yiddish accent in English. The accent is commonly understood to be used among New York Jews. It came to America with the culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews who immigrated in the late 19th century to avoid Russian pogroms. Yiddish is the language of the Jewish Diaspora. As such, it is an immigrant language. A pidgin language. A creole. It originated with Jews in Germany, who tossed Slavic, Old French, Old Italian, and medieval German into a bowl of Hebrew. Presto! Yiddish.

Much of New York’s intellectual circle in the early ½ of the 20th century was Jewish. As such, their writings wedged their way into the zeitgeist of the intelligentsia, especially among aficionados of American literary society. Much of their culture has been coded into novels that have become quite popular.

My favourite example is Philip Roth, who won critical acclaim for his first book, Goodbye Columbus. His second, however; Portnoy’s Complaint, made him hugely famous. It was the story of a Jewish boy growing up with way too many Oedipal issues; and how as a grown man, these issues still affect him way too much. The book was actually meant as one big dirty joke, a satire of psychoanalysis, and the narrator peppers the text with Yiddish words. Roth was especially fond of using the following:

• kvetch: to complain, has a connotation of being annoying
• goy (also goyim, goyische): anything non-Jewish, but carries a derisive connotation toward someone high-class, WASP-ish, or “all-American”
• shlock: cheap products
• shtup: crude term for sexual intercourse
• shlong, putz, shmuck: penis
• shikse: a white girl, usually goyische

Reading Portnoy’s Complaint, I couldn’t help but notice that every time Roth’s narrator used one of these words, it showed up in italics, drawing special attention to itself in print. Years after I read this, I temped in a Jewish synagogue. Yiddish was used relatively frequently, but it sounded just like it had been written in that book. When Cantor Frenkel spoke, one could almost hear him underline the Yiddish words he inserted into conversation. As though each word was some kind of celebration of familiarity, a secret handshake or a verbal elbow-poke that everyone else could see.

Using Yiddish this way doesn’t have the quick, fluid ease one might expect from polyglots and code-switchers. For example, I have observed Spanish-speakers speak English, but then switch to Spanish when they want to talk about you behind your back, then back to English to avoid drawing suspicion to themselves. Yiddish doesn’t quite work that way. This is because hardly anyone speaks the language fluently any more.

In the short story “Envy, or Yiddish in America (from which this report takes its title),” Cynthia Ozick touched on this subject:

“The language was lost, murdered. The language – a museum. Of what other language can it be said that it died a sudden and definite death, in a given language, on a given piece of soil?”

Yiddish is disappearing. A significant portion of those who spoke it fluently died during the Holocaust. In America, those who could speak it fluently are frankly very old. One crisis facing America’s Jewish community is the likelihood that Yiddish will die with its elderly.

“To speak of Yiddish” is “to preside over a funeral,” Ozick wrote.

The Yiddish accent, appearing in English, closely resembles the New York accent. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Jewish immigrants came to the U.S. through New York City and tended to live in the same neighbourhoods. Later, Jews spread to communities in other cities. In major metropolitan areas (Chicago, Los Angeles, North Miami Beach), the accent is still strong within the Jewish communities. One interesting observation is that, among other ethnic groups; Chinese-Americans, Chicanos, et cetera, the children of immigrants tend to lose their parents’ accents relatively quickly. Among Jews, however, the accent persists among immigrants’ children and their childrens’ children. Thus, you will find the accent strong among Jewish communities in New York and Los Angeles, even though there is obviously no longer an influx of Jewish immigrants from Europe.

Outside of a concentrated Jewish population, however, young people tend to lose the accent anyway. I’ve met a few Jewish people in Manhattan and I could not detect a trace of the accent. For a long time, years ago, I dated a Jewish girl who had grown up in Wisconsin. She was very conscious of a certain Jewish identity; linguistically, this came out the day she taught me how to say “Chanukah:”

“Hanukah,” I said.
“No. You’ve got to ‘hk’ your ‘hs,’” she said. “Almost like you’re coughing up something from the back of your throat.”

Although the accent resembles what we think of as the New York accent, it also includes certain Eastern European characteristics. Like with Slavic languages and Hebrew, it has the guttural K sound, distinguishing it as a Satem language. Another feature is that with someone who has a thick accent, “we” sounds like “ve.” It also employs an R-less pronunciation, but instead of just omitting the “R,” that section of the word is often replaced with a velar glide. “Where” would sound like “way-uh,” and “portion” would sound like “po-uh-shun.” This is not as smooth-sounding as, for instance, the Boston accent; rather, that velar glide gives special emphasis to the vowel sound. In many cases, the new schwa sound inserted into the word receives slight emphasis with an upward intonation. The aforementioned girl’s mother would pronounce the Spanish “Rancho” as “reh-an’-cho,” after which I often mocked her. For that I am deeply sorry.

A number of Yiddish words have entered common usage in English:

• chutzpah: gall
• klutz: clumsy person
• mavin: expert
• mensch: decent fellow
• shmooze: to sit around and chat
• tochos: from this we get “toosh”

Many varieties of English have acquired a romantic character. To the American ear, Scottish or Irish carries a musical rhythm. The Yiddish twang, however, does not. The dialect seems to be pronounced with a nasally quality. People scrunch up their noses to mock it, like Dr. Hateley did when mocking you wacky Kansans.

Additionally, a great deal of the vocabulary is bound with a specific religious and cultural aspect; yarmulke, mohel, gefilte fish are not quite as portable and attractive as certain colourful Texanisms, and lack the “American” character of a proper New England WASP’s cheerfully condescending dialect. It also sounds very close to the New Jersey accent, exemplified among the wives in “Goodfellas,” which often strikes people as sounding low-class, thus casting the accent in a negative light in popular consciousness.

Because of this, to the rest of American-English speakers, the accent often comes off as somewhat shrill, perhaps even obnoxious. It is not propagated in popular music or movies with the same exotic glamour bestowed on the die-hard Southerner or the swaggering, blue-collar Irishman.

But for those who are in on the secret, speakers often take delight in this marginalization of the dialect. Use of Yiddish, even if it sounds somehow awkward or self-conscious, is a triumph, a celebration, a linguistic festival. Mazel Tov!