Yiddish

About Yiddish

Yiddish is the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews, who come from Central and Eastern Europe. Before the Second World War it had more than 10 million speakers. Today about a million people speak it, above all in Hasidic communities in New York, Israel, London and Antwerp, where children still grow up with it.

Yiddish grew from medieval German and mixes in many words from Hebrew, Aramaic and the Slavic languages. It is written from right to left in the Hebrew alphabet, but unlike Hebrew it writes out its vowels. The guides add a spelling in Latin letters. Like German, it has a familiar "you", du, and a polite one, ir, for strangers and older people.

FamilyIndo-European, West Germanic
Speakersabout 1 million (2010)
Where spokenUnited States, Israel, United Kingdom, Belgium and other countries
Statusdefinitely endangered (UNESCO)
ScriptHebrew alphabet, right to left
Codesyi (ISO 639-1), yid (ISO 639-3)

Speaker number: Ethnologue (2010), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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