Daytshmerish (, defined as ''having a German character'') is a Yiddish term for Germanized variant or orthography of Yiddish. Daytshmerish Yiddish is spelled and enunciated as ' instead of '.

History

The term was coined in the 19th century to describe the style of Yiddish spoken by some educated

Eastern European Jews The expression ''Eastern European Jewry'' has two meanings. Its first meaning refers to the current political spheres of the Eastern European countries and its second meaning refers to the Jewish communities in Russia and Poland. The phrase 'Ea ...

. Some educated Jews saw Yiddish as a lower-class

slang A slang is a vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in everyday conversation but avoided in formal writing and speech. It also often refers to the language exclusively used by the members of pa ...

() that could be 'improved' by inserting German terms. The many borrowings from German were intended to make users sound cultivated, but it sounded pompous and pretentious to those Yiddish speakers who had no sense of linguistic inferiority vis-à-vis German, thus it was often put to comic use by Yiddish playwrights and writers of fiction who parodied it. According to the Yiddish scholar

Dovid Katz Dovid Katz (Yiddish: , also , Hirshe-Dovid Kats, , born 9 May 1956) is an American-born Vilnius-based scholar, author, and educator specializing in Yiddish language and literature, Lithuanian-Jewish culture, and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. ...

, "prejudices and misconceptions" concerning Yiddish were promulgated by both antisemites and well-meaning

Jewish assimilation Jewish assimilation (, ''hitbolelut'') refers either to the gradual cultural assimilation and social integration of Jews in their surrounding culture or to an ideological program in the age of emancipation promoting conformity as a potential so ...

ists during the 19th century, both of whom regarded Yiddish as a degenerated form of German. According to Katz, critics of Yiddish often highlighted the

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

Slavic Slavic, Slav or Slavonic may refer to: Peoples * Slavic peoples, an ethno-linguistic group living in Europe and Asia ** East Slavic peoples, eastern group of Slavic peoples ** South Slavic peoples, southern group of Slavic peoples ** West Slav ...

, and

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

syncretism Syncretism () is the practice of combining different beliefs and various school of thought, schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merging or religious assimilation, assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the ...

of Yiddish to allege that the language was impure and corrupted.

Sholem Aleichem Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich (; May 13, 1916), better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish language, Yiddish and , also spelled in Yiddish orthography#Reform and standardization, Soviet Yiddish, ; Russian language, Russian and ), ...

is widely credited with elevating the prestige of Yiddish language as a cultured language in its own right.

References

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Yiddish Yiddish, historically Judeo-German, is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in 9th-century Central Europe, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with ...

Yiddish culture Typography German orthography Yiddish words and phrases