Yiddish

Yiddish is a West Germanic language and Jewish ethnolect, historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews and once called Judeo-German. It arose in the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, built on High German with many elements from Hebrew, notably Mishnaic Hebrew, and from Aramaic, and most varieties also contain Slavic words and traces of Romance vocabulary. It has traditionally been written in the Hebrew alphabet. Before the Second World War it counted eleven to thirteen million speakers, and the murder of about six million Jews in the Holocaust, most of them Yiddish speakers, caused a massive decline, followed by shift to national languages and to Modern Hebrew. Today most daily speakers are Hasidic and other Haredi Jews, and a 2021 Rutgers estimate put the total near 600,000. Modern Yiddish has two major dialect groups, Eastern and Western, with Eastern far more common; Ethnologue classes Western Yiddish as endangered. The term Yiddish is also used adjectivally for Ashkenazi culture, as in Yiddish cooking and music.