This chapter begins by outlining the history and development of Yiddish, the traditional vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, and it discusses how Yiddish went from being a vibrant language spoken by millions to being an endangered minority language with only a fraction of its original speaker population – primarily as a result of the Holocaust. The chapter explains how Yiddish came to be spoken in Britain from the 1880s onwards, when large numbers of Ashkenazim fled there to escape poverty and pogroms, and it details the initial tensions and subsequent cooperation between different waves and generations of Yiddish-speaking newcomers (which entailed shifting attitudes towards the Yiddish language). The chapter then provides an overview of the past and current geographical distribution of Yiddish-speaking communities in Britain, with a focus on the main urban centres, and it explores especially London’s thriving Yiddish culture between the two World Wars. This is followed by a discussion of the linguistic consequences of contact between Yiddish and English speakers, and particularly borrowings from each language into the other. Throughout, differences are explained regarding the language use and intergenerational transmission patterns of Yiddish among Haredi as compared to secular communities.

This chapter examines the many roles played by signs in dissonant languages, that is languages no longer spoken on city streets, in the urban linguistic landscape. These ghost signs are examined in four cities designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as World heritage sites: Toledo, St Petersburg, Palermo, and Lviv. Primary data comes from my fieldwork, which included site visits, participation in tours in relevant languages, interviews with tour guides and visitors, and analyses of UNESCO reports, tourist guides, media, and travelogues. A critical analysis of the data shows that multilingual ghost signs perform multifaceted urban identity work: promoting attractive narratives of harmonious past diversity, they recontextualize the cities as “welcoming” and “cosmopolitan” and deflect attention from present-day suppression of minority languages, be it Uzbek in St Petersburg or Russian in Lviv.

After the US entered WWI, federal and state governments took action to suppress or even ban the use of languages other than English through the mails, in schools, and in various public settings. Moves to require English targeted nonanglophones, whether they were born in the US or had immigrated from elsewhere, and official English became a rallying cry for those bent on reducing or eliminating immigration. But such laws have little impact on the acquisition of English, as newcomers to the US continue to acquire English at rates equal to or better than those in previous generations. Without official language legislation at the federal level, the US manages to have more monolingual speakers of the majority language than many nations that do impose language bans on their residents.

Conquered peoples are turned into sideshow exhibits at the St. Louis World’s Fair, with Filipinos singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Geronimo singing and dancing for spectators. Black composers fight against the deracialization of ragtime threatened by white popularizers like Irving Berlin and Lewis Muir, while Chinese opera singers work to challenge the orientalism and exoticism of a snowballing “Chinatown” craze in popular music. The walls of the Angel Island and Ellis Island detention centers are scrawled with anonymous songs of despair and outrage, and the corrido continues to challenge US hegemony with its portrayals of legendary outlaws like Gregorio Cortéz and Pancho Villa. George M. Cohan – “the man who owns Broadway” – emerges with his own muscular celebrations of US power. The cities are swelling with immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, and Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths warn them not to “Bite the Hand that Feeds You.” Immigrant performers like Adolf Philipp and Eduardo Migliaccio work to ease the path of assimilation for their fellow countrymen, and the Yiddish musical theater sinks its roots deeper into the foundations of US culture. Puccini’s US-themed operas – Madama Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West – inspire Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick to write The Padrone, his own operatic critique of immigrant exploitation.

Labor’s gloves are off, and the country is rocked by waves of strikes, all backed by militant battle songs. The Pullman Strike brings to the fore Eugene Debs and other champions of labor and socialism, Coxey’s Army marches on Washington (singing), German immigrants fly the red flag of Anarchism (in song), and Jews fleeing from Russian pogroms swell the streets and sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side, transforming the national soundscape with Yiddish labor anthems and laying the foundations of modern musical theater. The Mexican corrido becomes more prominent amidst white nativist hostility, and in California the Chinese community continues to pit their authentic songs of struggle against the slanders of minstrelsy and the insult of the Chinese Exclusion Act. On the western plains, the Lakota Ghost Dance and its attendant songs drive the US government into a panic born of ignorance, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee. With the frontier officially closed and white settler colonialism entrenched from sea to shining sea, the champions of Manifest Destiny look further westward, to the Pacific islands, where a songwriter named Lili’uokalani, the queen of Hawai’i, awaits her overthrow.

This chapter provides an overview of how to use focus groups in order to elicit language attitudes. Focus groups allow access to the collective discourse practices of a specified group of participants and can be used as a way of eliciting more natural and spontaneous responses. However, participants may feed off each other’s ideas rather than express their own original thoughts, and certain minority opinions may be downplayed, repressed, or withheld by the participants. Nevertheless, this method can be viewed as an attempt to analyse salient social representations in a communicative conversational situation and can yield otherwise unrevealed strands of research participants’ narratives. After an exploration of the advantages and disadvantages of using focus groups to investigate language attitudes, this chapter offers an overview of key practical issues of planning and research design. The analysis of the data resulting from focus group discussions is explored, particularly from a critical sociolinguistic perspective, involving mapping/categorisation of the data, tracing the circulation of people and resources over space and time, finding meaningful connections, and making valid claims. The chapter concludes with a case study of attitudes towards Breton and Yiddish in a variety of settings.

This chapter discusses – in the general problematics of languages in contact – Jewish languages and languages of the Diaspora. It intends to study from a comparative perspective especially the diachrony of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish, two diasporic languages with similar developments and destinies. After a short presentation of the two languages, we examine successively: 1) the creation of Judaeo-languages in Diaspora, 2) the Diaspora versus migration, 3) the Judaeo-calque languages, 4) the common dynamics of Jewish languages, and 5) the diachrony of Jewish languages. The conclusion focuses on the successful innovations appearing in a Jewish language. It points out the important role of the Hebrew component (its direct and indirect influence), as well as the broad interlinguistic competence of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish speakers in the process of evolution of the languages considered.

Multilingualism in Israel emerged thousands of years ago with Hebrew, Judeo-Aramaic, and Greek all playing meaningful roles. Today`s multilingualism started to take shape with the return of Jews at the end of the nineteenth century and the revitalization of Hebrew. This reverse migration has given rise to a complex multilingual tapestry of 40–50 Heritage Languages (HLs) spoken by 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation immigrants, as well as indigenous vernaculars of Arabic. In the current chapter, we select five HLs (English, Russian, Amharic, Yiddish, and Juhuri), which vary considerably in the number of speakers, social status as perceived by in-group speakers and by the outside world, the presence and transmission of literacy, and by the aspiration of the speakers to integrate into Israeli society. Despite all these differences, all HLs interact with and are influenced to greater or lesser degrees by Hebrew, the only official language of the State of Israel, giving rise to hybrid versions identifiable with bilingual speakers of the particular language pair. The chapter overviews the linguistic and sociolinguistic properties of these HLs and discusses potential mechanisms that may account for divergence from native speakers in the country of origin or dominant speakers of the HL.

The eighteenth century is defined as the definitive period of modern Kabbalah, echoing revolutionary changes in Europe and America. The natural focus here is on the first three generations of Hasidism, as the first enduring kabbalistic social movement. Magic and sociology join theology and ideology to convey the richness of the movement. Extensive analysis is also devoted to the movement's opponents, spearheaded by R. Eliyahu, the Gaon of Vilna. The chapter's main innovation is the extensive treatment of R. Shalom Shar‘abi (Rashash) and the hegemony that he and his close students established in Near Eastern communities. Here the stress is on the three-dimensional depiction of the kabbalistic universe, and the accompanying doctrines of relativity, interchangeability, temporality and nominalism. Another innovation is the exposure of lesser known circles. The chapter concludes with discussions of the role of Kabbalah in the general and Jewish philosophical wave, as well as a summary of general characteristics of the century's Kabbalah, such as individualization, greater focus on everyday life and a search for totality.