“It’s one of those things that you knew existed but nobody ever mentioned – the four dialects of Yiddish. I never. But then, I can understand some Yiddish, but not all. Die Gemmora ist Bleib schwere.

“But I am interested – what are the four dialects of Yiddish?”

the easiest way to explain without the ability to draw a picture is to have you imagine a rectangle – thinking of pre-wwII europe, on the left (west) is germany, on the right (east) is lithuania, romania, poland, russia, etc. the 2 main dialect groups are western and eastern yiddish, divided that way. i’m not as familiar with western yiddish because it is much closer to german in terms of pronunciations (as they evolved side-by-side) and we studied primarily eastern yiddish. i believe there are subdivisions within western yiddish, though, perhaps not as clearly differentiated as those in the east. within eastern yiddish, there are 3 major subdivisions: northeastern yiddish (which we studied, specifically – as spoken in belarus, russia, etc.), southeastern yiddish (more like what was spoken in the areas including romania), and central yiddish (spoken in the areas in between, including poland). along with the different dialects came different customs and cultural differences; this is similar to how in the united states you have american english divided, simply speaking, into 3 dialects* northern, central (or midland), and southern, but within each of those dialects there are sub-dialects (e.g. boston vs. brooklyn vs. minnesota in the north, washington dc vs. pittsburgh/appalachia in the midland dialect, or williamsburg va vs. tennessee vs. texas in the south).

* NOTE: i used the 3 major geographic dialect groups, and did not include AAVE aka ebonics, for the sake of simplicity – not because i discount AAVE, but because it doesn’t fit perfectly into my analogy of yiddish vs. american english linguistic geography since it’s a different type of dialect group not bound by geographic constraints…

hope that was helpful and not entirely confusing!

-j

Sandy