Though the primary use of Yiddish has long been oral, there is an ample record of Yiddish as a written language dating back to the sixteenth century, with more limited evidence from earlier centuries. The appearance of these texts—the spelling of words, and even the form of letters—itself offers revealing evidence of the language’s history. As a vernacular that has always existed alongside other languages, used over an intercontinental expanse, flourishing largely beyond official oversight, and imbued with a range of ideological values, the appearance of Yiddish reflects diverse visions of its place in Jewish life over the centuries.
A hallmark of most Jewish languages is that they are written in their own alphabet, called the alef-bet in Modern Hebrew and alef-beys in Yiddish. This alphabet has semiotic value in its own right. Its use to record a text conventionally marks it a priori as being for a Jewish readership—even when the text is entirely in an ostensibly “non-Jewish” language. Examples of this practice range from Moses Mendelssohn’s translation of selections from the Hebrew Bible into German, printed in the Jewish alphabet in 1783, to signage on Jewish shops in New York’s Lower East Side during the first half of the twentieth century that render English phonetically in the alef-beys: בּארבּער שאפּ (“Barber Shop”), טשיקען מארקעט (“Chicken Market”).1 Therefore, though scholars have debated whether the language of early Ashkenazic manuscripts—notably the fourteenth-century verse epic Dukus Horant (Duke Horant), which appears in the Cambridge Codex—is German or Yiddish, its appearance in the alef-beys clearly marks it as intended particularly for Jewish readers.2
The Jewish alphabet, as developed many centuries ago to record Hebrew, uses twenty-two basic consonants primarily to indicate syllables. Some consonants can also be used to indicate vowel sounds; in other instances, vocalization is either implicit or can be indicated by the addition of nekudot (Hebrew: “vowel signs”; Yiddish: nekudes), marks that are written above, below, or within consonants. For example: emunah אמונה ~ אֱמוּנָה (“faith”). Using this alphabet to record a non-Semitic language—not only Yiddish but also Judezmo, Romaniote, and Jewish correlates of Italian, Persian, and Turkish, among others—necessitates some orthographic innovations that correlate to the alphabet of its primary component. Hence, the traditional spelling of Yiddish accommodates two different orthographic systems. First, it largely maintains the conventional Hebrew and Aramaic spelling of terms in the Semitic component; second, Yiddish spells words from the other components of the language in a system that generally emulates the Roman alphabet by using each letter (or cluster of letters) of the alef-beys to signify the sound of a consonant, vowel, or diphthong rather than a syllable. The primary distinction of the latter system, which to some extent follows the orthographies of earlier diaspora Jewish languages, concerns the indication of vowel sounds. This system evolved over centuries; in modern writing, the vowels and diphthongs in Yiddish are rendered as follows, per YIVO Standard orthography, which is now the most widely used system in secular and academic publications:
| Letter | Name | Sound | Example | ||
| אַ | pasekh-alef | a (as in far) | װאַנט | vant | “wall” |
| ע | ayen | e (as in bed) | שפּעט | shpet | “late” |
| י | yud* | i (as in igloo) | מיד | mid | “tired” |
| אָ | komets-alef | o (as in for) | אָפֿט | oft | “often” |
| ו | vov** | u (as in put) | קוקן | kukn | “to look” |
| יי | tsvey yudn | ey (as in hey) | צוויי | tsvey | “two” |
| ײַ | pasekh tsvey yudn | ay (as in bayou) | קרײַד | krayd | “chalk” |
| וי | vov-yud | oy (as in toy) | בלוי | bloy | “blue” |
When a non-loshn-koydesh word starts with a vowel sound other than e, a, or o, Yiddish follows the precedent of Hebrew orthography and begins the word with a shtumer (“silent”) alef. As the name suggests, this letter does not signify a sound of its own but indicates, in this position, that an initial vowel written with vov or yud follows:
| אומעטום | umetum | “everywhere” |
| אויסמײַדן | oysmaydn | “to avoid” |
| איצט | itst | “now” |
| אייניקל | eynikl | “grandchild” |
| אײַזנבאַן | ayznban | “railroad” |
Shtumer alef has also been used to disambiguate the use of yud and vov as consonants versus as vowels or diphthongs when the letters would otherwise appear adjacent to one another:
| פּרואוואונג | pruvung | “ordeal” |
| שנייאיק | shneyik | “snowy” |
YIVO Standard orthography distinguishes these different uses of vov and yud by adding nekudes to these letters when used as vowels adjacent to their use as consonants or in diphthongs:
| Letter | Name | Example | |
| וּ | melupm-vov | פּרוּוווּנג | pruvung |
| יִ | khirek-yud | שניייִק | shneyik |
Additional Yiddish orthographic innovations include consonant clusters, signifying sounds not present in loshn-koydesh:
| Letter | Name | Sound | Example | ||
| טש | tes-shin | tsh (like ch in chair) | טשערעפּאַכע | tsherepakhe | “turtle” |
| זש | zayen-shin | zh (like z in azure) | זשאַלעווען | zhaleven | “to begrudge” |
| דזש | dalet-zayen-shin | dzh (like j in joy) | דזשימדזשיק | dzhimdzhik | “gadget” |
There are four pairs and one triad of consonants that are homophonic in both Ashkenazic Hebrew and Yiddish. In modern Yiddish orthography, only one letter in each group is used for these sounds, except for words from the Hebrew and Aramaic components, when maintaining their traditional spelling:
| Sound | Consonant used for all non-loshn-koydesh words | Example | Consonant used only in loshn-koydesh words | Example |
| v | וו tsvey vovn | ווער ver (“who”) | בֿ*** veys | עבֿירה aveyre (“sin”) |
| kh | כ khof | כאַפּן khapn (“to catch”) | ח khes | חלום kholem (“dream”) |
| t | ט tes | טאָפּ top (“pot”) | תּ tov | תּמיד tomed (“always”) |
| k | ק kuf | קומען kumen (“to come”) | כּ kof | כּלה kale (“bride”) |
| s | ס samekh | סלוי sloy (“jar”) | ׂש sin ת*** sof | שׂימחה simkhe (“joy”) אַחריות akhrayes (“responsibility”) |
Words that fuse Semitic components with other components, such as adjectival or verbal affixes, likewise integrate the two spelling systems:
| מורא | moyre | “fear” |
| מוראדיק | moyredik | “fearful” |
| גנבֿ | ganev | “robber” |
| געגנבֿעט | geganvet | “robbed” |
| חזיר | khazer | “pig” |
| חזירלעך | khazerlekh | “piglets” |
As is typical of writing in other vernacular languages that lack a widely accepted standard orthography for most of their history, Yiddish texts have manifested considerable differences in spelling in both manuscript and printed form. At the same time, certain norms appear regularly among this diversity of spelling systems. Thus, the earliest Yiddish manuscripts reflect some of the conventions of Hebrew orthography, rather than strictly imitating the spellings of Middle High German dialects—for example, the aforementioned use of the shtumer alef at the beginning of words with certain initial vowel sounds and the distinctive final forms of five consonants: khof / langer khof (כ/ך), mem / shlos mem (מ/ם), nun / langer nun (נ/ן), fey / langer fey (פֿ/ף), tsadek / langer tsadek (צ/ץ). The orthographic norms of these early works continued with relatively little variation for centuries and informed the spelling systems of the first Yiddish publications.3
• • •
Both written and printed works of early Yiddish manifest a distinct visual presence compared to Ashkenazic texts in Hebrew and Aramaic of the same period. Because differences in handwriting in early Yiddish texts were more variable than contemporaneous writing in Hebrew, they provide more specific evidence of where and when they were written.4 Early in the history of Yiddish print a special set of typefaces was widely used for the language, both in publications that were entirely in Yiddish and to distinguish Yiddish from Hebrew in bilingual works. Printing Yiddish with these special fonts continued into the early nineteenth century. These typefaces were referred to by a variety of names, including mesheyt or mashket and, later, taytsh, ivre-taytsh, kleyn-taytsh, vayberksav, and vaybertaytsh.5 As noted in the previous chapter, the last two terms reflect a gendered association of Yiddish literacy with women.
A page from Elijah Levita’s Shemot devarim (Names of things), a lexicon glossing terms in German, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish, published in 1542. The Yiddish terms (listed in the right-hand column) are set in the distinctive font, sometimes called meshket or vaybertaytsh, that was used most often for Yiddish during the first centuries of Jewish book publishing.
By the turn of the nineteenth century some Yiddish publications began to use nikudes to indicate all vowel sounds. The nikudes are often redundant markers of vowel sounds (for example, הָאבֶּען vs. Standard Yiddish האָבן [hobn]); other times, they indicate vowels that are represented by letters in Standard Yiddish orthography (דֶר vs. Standard Yiddish דער [der]). The presence of nikudes reflects a presumption of readers’ familiarity with reading devotional Hebrew texts that use these vowel signs, such as a prayer book, and also implicitly relates Yiddish literacy to reading loshn-koydesh.
Changes in Yiddish orthography became more programmatic as a new self-consciousness about Yiddish and its place in modern Jewish life developed during the 1800s. Efforts to model norms for Yiddish spelling appear early in the century—for example, in the maskil Mendel Lefin’s translation of Ecclesiastes into Yiddish.6 A threshold development of modern Yiddish orthography is the publication of Shiye-Mordkhe Lifshits’s Russian-Yiddish and Yiddish-Russian dictionaries, first issued in 1869 and 1876, respectively. Lifshits introduced enduring principles of Yiddish spelling that reflect the language’s phonology (other than vocabulary terms in the Semitic component, for which he maintained their traditional spelling).
In contrast with these efforts, many publications of modern Yiddish literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adopted orthographies influenced by German spelling, including the use of redundant double consonants, added unstressed vowels, and the inclusion of ayen or hey to indicate long vowels. This spelling reflects a larger notion then prevalent that literary Yiddish should emulate German.
| Pronunciation | Definition | Standard spelling | “Germanized” spelling | German correlate |
| yor | “year” | יאָר | יאָהר | Jahr |
| ale | “all” (pronoun) | אַלע | אַללע | alle |
| (d)ertseylung | “story” | דערציילונג | ערצעהלונג | Erzählung |
| vider | “again” | ווידער | וויעדער | wieder |
| farfirn | “to seduce” | פֿאַרפֿירן | פערפיהרען | verführen |
| sheyn | “pretty, nice” | שיין | שעהן | schön |
The twentieth century witnessed multiple attempts by institutions to establish a standard Yiddish orthography. These efforts reflect not only the burgeoning demands of publishing in the language and the expanding dispersal of Yiddish speakers but also new ideological valuations of Yiddish in relation to other modern languages of high culture. Given the wide range of publishing and instruction in Yiddish at the time, as well as the general lack of centralized institutions in a position to enforce standards, they have been contested at least as much as they have been adopted. This lack of consensus indicates, in part, a greater desire among different groups (and sometimes individual authors) to distinguish their use of the language from others’ than to support orthographic consistency among all Yiddish writers.
Exceptional are the Soviet Union’s mandated radical reforms of Yiddish spelling in the 1920s, which included eliminating the use of those consonants found only in words of loshn-koydesh origin and requiring these words to be spelled phonetically, rather than traditionally. Soviet Yiddish orthography also eliminated the distinctive final forms of five consonants, though they were reinstated later.
| Traditional spelling | Soviet spelling | ||
| emes | “truth” | אמת | עמעס |
| sholem | “peace” | שלום | שאָלעמ |
| levone | “moon” | לבֿנה | לעוואָנע |
| kasril | “pauper” | כּתריאל | קאסריל |
| soyne | “enemy” | שׂונא | סוינע |
These developments paralleled Soviet orthographic reforms of the Cyrillic alphabet, which similarly eliminated phonetically redundant letters. Soviet Yiddish spelling was also part of a larger effort to distance the language from Hebrew, derogated for its association with religion and Zionism.7 However, no attempt was made to abandon the alef-beys altogether for another alphabet. Versions of Soviet orthography were also adopted by some left-wing Yiddish writers and publishers outside the Soviet Union, including books and periodicals used in American secular Yiddish schools affiliated with the Communist Party in the 1930s.
After years of development, the YIVO Institute codified its standard orthography in 1937.8 At the same time that this system was implemented by secular Yiddish schools and publishers in interwar Poland, traditionally observant Yiddish speakers promoted an alternate system, created by Solomon Birnbaum.9 Supporters of his orthography, which was adopted by Bais Yaakov schools in 1930, argued that it better reflected how Yiddish was spoken by the majority of eastern European Jews, as opposed to the YIVO Standard, which more closely resembled the speech of a Lithuanian-based minority of Yiddish speakers. Moreover, Birnbaum’s standard, which he called “traditionalist” in contrast to YIVO’s “nationalist” system, was hailed as closer to the pious origins of early Yiddish writing and therefore would serve as a bulwark against secularism.10
| YIVO Standard orthography | Birnbaum’s “traditionalist” orthography | ||
| perl | “pearl” | פּערל | פּעֶרל |
| bin | “[I] am” | בין | בּיִן |
| hoykh | “high, loud” | הויך | הוֹיך |
| ort | “place” | אָרט | ארט |
| gezunt | “health” | געזונט | גיזונט |
Though the YIVO Standard is widely used today, efforts to see that secular Yiddish schools, newspapers, and publishers conform to this system continued to meet with opposition after World War II. For example, Yiddishists picketed the New York offices of the Jewish Daily Forward in 1970 to protest its resistance to adopting YIVO orthography (which the newspaper eventually did).11 In the postwar era, Hasidic Yiddish publications manifest a variety of orthographic practices, reflecting the widely scattered geographic dispersion of Hasidim after the Holocaust as well as differences among Hasidic communities.12 The advent of Yiddish language curricula in Hasidic schools has fostered efforts to standardize spelling within individual communities.
• • •
Even as the Jewish alphabet has been central to writing and publishing Yiddish throughout its history, the language has occasionally appeared in other systems, including sign language and shorthand.13 In addition, distinctive gestural practices have signified the oral language visually. Observers of eastern European Jews frequently described Yiddish speakers’ gesticulations, in both written accounts and illustrations. Anthropologist David Efron analyzed the gestures of “traditional” (as opposed to “assimilated”) speakers of what he termed “ghetto-Yiddish” among immigrants in New York City and concluded that “the ‘traditional’ Eastern Jew very seldom displays physiographic or symbolic gestures,” in contrast to neighboring immigrants from southern Italy. Rather, “the ghetto Jew is more likely to give a gestural notation of the process” of his thinking, constituting a “gestural description of the ‘physiognomy’ . . . of his discourse.” For example, he may use his arm as “a pointer, to link one proposition to another, or to trace the itinerary of a logical journey.”14
By far the most widespread alternative to the alef-beys for visualizing Yiddish is the Roman alphabet. Romanization occurs most often when Yiddish words or phrases are embedded in texts written in other languages or in reference systems, such as the United States Library of Congress, which catalogs Yiddish publications with a romanization system similar to the YIVO Standard. Romanized Yiddish is also widely used on the internet and for texting, especially outside of Israel.
Publishing entire Yiddish works in the Roman alphabet, however, is a relatively infrequent phenomenon, and a recent one, reflecting a variety of rationales for doing so. For example, the challenge of integrating Yiddish text into a notation system that runs in the opposite direction of the alef-beys emerged at the turn of the twentieth century with the publication of Yiddish songs in sheet music, which typically romanizes Yiddish lyrics.15 Several books issued during the early decades of the twentieth century use the Roman alphabet to facilitate access to Yiddish texts for readers who do not know the alef-beys but for whom comprehension of the language or even access to the sound of these texts would be of some interest. These publications include the anthology appended to philologist Leo Wiener’s The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (with English translations facing the romanized Yiddish)16 and two popular collections of Yiddish folklore for readers of German, compiled by folklorist Immanuel Olsvanger: Rosinkess mit Mandlen (Raisins and almonds, 1920) and Rêjte Pomeranzen (Red oranges, 1936).17 These books offer the inverse of works in German published in the Jewish alphabet, such as Mendelssohn’s Bible translation, though in both cases the alphabet of publication serves as a bridge between texts and readers that is at the same time a sign of the disparity in literacy between language communities.
Among the earliest efforts to modernize Yiddish orthography by using Latin letters was a system designed in the early 1880s by Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof, the subsequent inventor of Esperanto.18 During the first decades of the twentieth century, a notable number of Yiddishists, including Nathan Birnbaum (the father of Solomon Birnbaum) and Chaim Zhitlowsky, also proposed that Yiddish be written with the Roman alphabet. Their aim was both to standardize its orthography and to mark its transformation from a traditional vernacular to the official language of a European nationality.19 Though none of these efforts met with success, a number of romanized Yiddish publications did appear in Europe in the years immediately following World War II, such as posters and newspapers printed in displaced persons’ camps in Germany. Then, however, the motive was not ideological but exigent, as printers’ type in the Jewish alphabet could not readily be found, having been destroyed during the war.
Displaced persons camp poster, printed in Munich in 1949, announcing a dance on the holiday of Simchas Torah. The poster uses the Roman alphabet to spell the Yiddish text, likely due to the lack of type in the alef-beys in postwar Europe. (From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.)
Romanization is especially common in ludic uses of Yiddish, such as isolated words or idioms that appear in mock dictionaries or on various collectibles, in which familiarity with Yiddish is assumed to be limited, and the interplay between Yiddish and another language is often central to their playfulness. Exemplifying this phenomenon is a premium that the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, gave to donors in the late 1990s: a wooden yoyo with oy oy printed on one side and אוי אוי on the other side. Romanized Yiddish words inscribed on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and a variety of other objects sometimes appear in fonts that imitate the distinctively curved serifs of the alef-beys in its traditional block form. These are, in effect, “kosher-style” Roman alphabet fonts, having the semblance, if not the substance, of Jewish tradition.20
This T-shirt, available for purchase online in 2019, is one among a wide assortment of mass-produced items printed with Yiddish words. These objects typically romanize Yiddish and often integrate it into a phrase or sentence in another language, playfully transgressing conventional linguistic boundaries. The “kosher-style” lettering imitates the distinctive serifs of a traditional Jewish alphabet font.
The visual appearance of Yiddish has anthropomorphic implications, which emerge when its orthography is compared with other semiotic systems signifying Jewish presence. The diversity of Yiddish orthographies parallels internal variations in dress worn by different Jewish communities—including head coverings, standards of modesty, and men’s facial hair—which indicate these Jews’ respective ideologies. Use of the alef-beys versus romanization, which marks texts as either closed or accessible to those who cannot read Yiddish, correlates to Jews’ public visibility perceived as either different or assimilated. And the rendering of Yiddish in a “kosher-style” Roman alphabet flouts any such simple boundary, suggesting that the language and its speakers are distinctive yet readily approachable.
* Yud serves as both a consonant (like the letter y in yes) and a vowel. In some dialects of Yiddish, vocalic yud is variously pronounced as a short vowel (like the letter i in big) or a long vowel (like ee in seem). For example, in these dialects, בין is pronounced like the English word bin when it means “[I] am” and like the English word bean when it means “bee.”
** When doubled, this letter is a consonant (װ), called tsvey vovn, with the sound v as in very.
*** Following Hebrew orthography, these letters never appear at the beginning of a word.