Yiddish-Colored Accents in Representations of Jewish Speech in Narrative Fiction in English, German, French, and Hebrew

Narrative fiction may resort to deviating spelling in representations of natural conversation to shape a figure`s speech as phonetically different, be it foreign or dialectal. Within this framework, European and North-American fiction may represent Yiddish accent in dialogue using special spelling deviations to characterize a figure as Jewish. In Modern Hebrew fiction, such accent formation serves as a token for Eastern-European born pioneer figures of the early 20^th century.

The London-born Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) of Eastern-European descent was probably the first to introduce this mode of representing Yiddish accent in English, which is also employed in North-American Jewish literature. In German fiction, the method of characterizing Jewish figures by representing their speech as Yiddish-sounding while sufficiently demarcated from German had appeared earlier than in English. In French, this mode is more recent and less engrained in literary norms than in German and English. Modern Hebrew literature had to wait for the emergence of the native Sabra speech habits in order for such accent-marking to convey a recognizable phonetic otherness.

In my talk, I shall illustrate and analyze the literary formation of Yiddish accent in a few works composed in or translated into English, German, French and Hebrew from the 18^th century on. The purpose of this ongoing study is to describe the principles of Yiddish accent formation in each of these languages and to evaluate the cultural features conditioning their applications in the four cultures. To conclude, I shall present a program for the pursuit of the study.