Re: Demotic/Koine/Prakit

Robdth Khailmn ~ Kheilmn (Robert Hailman):
> > What about the Yiddish of elsewhere in Eastern Europe? Had that died out
> > too? If it survived in some countries, did it survive more in cities or
> > in the countryside, and more in higher social strata or lower?
> >
> I'm not sure about in cities, but in the small Jewish shtetls (villages)
> of Poland it survived until the Holocaust when the shtetls themselvs
> were eliminated.
>
> > Is the Yiddish spoken in America a survival from earlier immigration, or
> > is it a language revival/resuscitation?
> >
> Mainly from earlier immigration, from my experience, although I can't be
> sure of this. When the Jews came to America, they spoke many different
> languages, but rarely English, and used Yiddish in newspapers and such
> to find eachother and form Jewish communities.
[...]
>
> Hope this helps,
It does help; it certainly disconfirms a claim I'd previously heard, that
Yiddish was extinct in Europe by the time of the Holocaust. Would you happen
to know of any scholarly or other-wise authoritative treatment of the matter
-- a source that sums up where, geographically and socially, Yiddish was and
wasn't spoken in Europe in the 1930s?

--And.