Germanisms in twenty-first-century Haredi Satmar Yiddish: a fifth genetic component, erratic blocks, or an unexpected asset?

In the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, Eastern Yiddish experienced a great influx of borrowings from Modern German in vocabulary, spelling, inflectional morphology, and syntax. In the secular Standard Yiddish (Y klal-yidish) developed and promoted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, most of these borrowings were discarded in the 1930s and in the decades after World War II. Only in the Yiddish-speaking communities outside YIVO’s range of influence did German-style features survive on a large scale. Taking an issue of the New York City-based Yiddish-language weekly ‘Der id’ as a point of departure, the present study examines what is left of loanwords from Modern German in Haredi Satmar Yiddish in its written form and establishes criteria of how to identify them. Haredi Satmar Yiddish, in other publications termed Hasidic Yiddish, is the vernacular of the world’s largest and most vibrant ultra-Orthodox Jewish community today in New York City and other Haredi settlements around the globe. The survey is concluded by stating that a significant proportion of the German-origin loanwords that have survived into twenty-first-century Haredi Satmar Yiddish is not used at random, but fills a lexical gap particularly in the coverage of news from the surrounding gentile US-American world.