Contrastive Length in the Stressed Vowels of New York Hasidic Yiddish

Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish (HY) is the native vernacular of more than 146,000 people in New York State, where it is currently thriving in a bilingual relationship with English in circumstances reminiscent of its diasporic origins. HY is said to derive from the Central Yiddish varieties of Eastern Europe, which are unique among other Yiddish dialects in exhibiting a phonemic length distinction in their peripheral vowels, /i, u, a/. This acoustic analysis examines the duration and formant frequencies of peripheral HY and English vowels produced by early bilingual speakers two, three and four generations from immigration. While the phonology of HY has not yet been systematically described, preliminary results of this study suggest that whereas the durational distinction in the low vowel /a/ has been maintained (e.g., in words like haant ‘today’ and hant ‘hand’), the durational difference in high peripheral vowels /i/ and /u/ has gradually converged with the English tense/lax distinction (e.g., ‘seat’ and ‘sit’). Although linguistic assimilation is a frequently cited result of language contact, the precise extent and direction of change depend on a variety of factors. Recent research on bilingualism suggest that sounds in a speaker’s first and second languages may exert a bidirectional influence on each other: Phonologically similar sounds tend to merge into a single category even as phonologically distant sounds drift further apart. This investigation into the evolving phonology of HY in its unique sociocultural context is a significant contribution to Yiddish linguistics, and provides insight into current theories of multilingualism.