| The focus of this exploratory study is the language of the Jews of an upstate New York county. It was hypothesized that people who have a strong feeling of Jewish identity and who maintain Jewish traditions will be more likely to use Yiddish and Hebrew in their everyday language. In addition, the relationship between the use of Yiddish and Hebrew and birthplace, domain, gender, language ability and attitude was surveyed.;Based on the premise that language is an important symbol of ethnicity, Yiddish and Hebrew were regarded as being significant to Jewish identity. Furthermore, the notion of Jewish English was introduced as a label for the language used by the Jews.;Using participation observation, interviews and a survey the results obtained were inconsistent. The code mixing that was recorded by participation observation and interviews points to a relationship between Use of Yiddish and Hebrew, respectively, and tradition. However, the results of the statistical analysis obtained through the survey found birthplace to be a significant predictor of Use of Yiddish and Hebrew, respectively.;Jewish speakers choose lexical material from one language, Hebrew or Yiddish, and interject it into a conversation in the language being used for communication---in this case English. It is inconsequential how often Yiddish and Hebrew terms are employed. The resulting language can be called Jewish English and is used as an ethnic speech marker. |
