1/15/2024 0 Comments Duo lingo yiddish![]() ![]() ![]() Teaching a dialect, therefore, is seen by many as a defiant homage to what was lost. There were 13 million Yiddish speakers before the Holocaust today the number hovers at around half a million. This was further heightened by a fraught history. Others argued that Central Yiddish, which is most widely spoken, made more sense. It triggered a community-wide debate: some felt that the Northern dialect, which closely matches the written form, was most appropriate. Uncertain how to navigate this impasse, the team drafted a poll and posted it online, inviting others to vote. So whose dialect was going to be digitally archived as the Yiddish dialect? Whereas a speaker of Northern European Yiddish is more likely to have been taught at a secular university or school. If you hear someone speaking Central European Yiddish, Viswanath explained to me, it would be a relatively safe bet that they are from a Hassidic community in Brooklyn. The differences in pronunciation and grammar between these dialects are subtle, but for a native speaker they carry meaningful information about identity, culture and religious affiliation. Yiddish, which combines elements of German, Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic, is a language of many dialects corresponding to the different regions of Europe where they emerged. They had a target to get the course up and running towards the end of 2020, and to begin, progress was solid. ![]() Throughout October, Viswanath and three other contributors regularly met to discuss the curriculum over a shared Slack channel. Having grown up in the only Yiddish-speaking family in a majority English-speaking New Jersey neighborhood, the prospect of broadcasting her mother tongue to a global network of students was exciting. In October last year, Meena Viswanath, a 31-year-old civil engineer from Berkeley, California, joined a small team of volunteers who were developing a Yiddish course on Duolingo, the free language learning app with over 300 million users. Oscar Schwartz writes for the Guardian about the problems that arise when the language-learning app Duolingo tries to add endangered languages: ![]()
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