Jewish Languages - Contemporary Trends

Contemporary Trends

This broad picture was substantially modified by major historical shifts beginning in the late nineteenth century. The immigration of millions of European Jews to North America caused a dramatic increase in the number of Jewish English-speakers; colonialism in the Maghreb led most of its Jews to shift to French or Spanish; Zionism revived Hebrew as a spoken language, giving it a substantially increased vocabulary and a simplified sound system; the Holocaust eradicated the vast majority of Yiddish- and German-speaking European Jews; and the Arab-Israeli conflict led many Jews to leave the Arab world for other countries (mainly Hebrew-speaking Israel and French-speaking France), whose languages they largely adopted.

Jews today speak a large variety of languages, typically adopting the languages of their countries of residence. The largest single language spoken by Jews is English: The second largest Jewish population in the world is in the United States, and there are also large, substantial communities in Canada (a majority of Canadian Jews speak English, not French), the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. Ireland, New Zealand, and some islands of the Caribbean, also have small Jewish communities which speak predominantly English.

English is closely followed by Modern Hebrew, the spoken language in Israel, and by Israeli emigrants who live in other countries. Hebrew is the language of daily life in Israel, though a substantial proportion of the country's citizens are immigrants who speak it as their second language.

After English and Hebrew, the next largest language spoken by large populations of Jews is Russian, with perhaps two million speakers from the former Soviet Union, a majority of whom now live in Israel. Approximately 1 million Israelis speak Russian fluently.

French, Spanish, Portuguese and Yiddish constitute the final "tier" of languages spoken by major Jewish populations. French is spoken by hundreds of thousands of Jews in France and Quebec, most of them immigrants from North Africa who originally spoke Maghrebi Arabic or Ladino; however, most of them had already switched language before leaving North Africa. Spanish and Portuguese are spoken by large Jewish communities in Central and South America; Buenos Aires has a large Jewish community. A substantial number of current immigrants to Israel speak French or Spanish as their mother tongue.Yiddish continues to be spoken by older generations of Jews, as well as by four to six hundred thousand individuals in Haredi communities. Although the number of older speakers is continually decreasing, there is revived interest in Yiddish in academia and the arts; and the populations of Yiddish-speaking Hasidic communities are growing, especially among younger generations.

Thus Yiddish, once the language of the majority of the world's Jews, continues to be spoken, as are nearly all the languages discussed in the preceding section. However, some of these languages, notably Judeo-Arabic and Ladino, are considered to be gravely endangered.