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Outlawing orality: Western Yiddish reflexes in German fiction

Abstract This study analyses how fictional languages can be influenced by natural languages exemplified by the use of Yiddish. It shows how a fictional language can be a data source for research on historical development of Western Yiddish (WY) and its sociolinguistic situation. In contrast to the varieties of Eastern Yiddish (EY), which are still spoken today, Western Yiddish was given up during the complex acculturation process of West-Ashkenazic Jewry during the nineteenth century. As a language driven by a pejorative view of language variations and by growing antisemitism, Yiddish found its way into German fiction, where it is still used in contemporary fiction as a means of characterising Jewish figures. This article presents the main results of a corpus study on 53 of such fictional texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Yiddish examples in Yiddish script will be primarily quoted in their original form and then be transliterated following the YIVO romanisation system (cf. Weinreich 1968). It will be shown that reflexes of spoken WY can be found in these imitations of Yiddish. This data can be used as secondary evidence of WY structures. Furthermore, the data gives an impression of the intensity of the language contact situation between German and Yiddish. In addition it gives insights into mechanisms of how German Jews were excluded from the German ideal of a Sprachnation.