This framework is based on an article by Sarah Bunin Benor, currently in manuscript form.  With comments, please contact Sarah: sbenor(@)huc.edu.

For any given Jewish community – defined as a group of Jews living in the same territory in a given period – we might ask the following questions about their language use.  Linguistic “features” here refers to words and grammatical structures (including phonology/pronunciation, syntax/word order, semantics/meaning, pragmatics, and discourse).  Note that some of the questions (especially 3 and 4) are not relevant to all Jewish communities.

Linguistic variables

1.      Textual Hebrew/Aramaic influence: To what extent does the linguistic repertoire include influence from and references to biblical and rabbinic texts of law, lore, and liturgy? (Weinreich 1980)

2.      Substratal influence: To what extent does the linguistic repertoire include features from ancestral languages spoken before migration or language shift? (ibid)

3.      Israeli Hebrew influence: In the era of political Zionism and the State of Israel, to what extent does the linguistic repertoire include features from Modern Israeli Hebrew? (Benor 1998, 2000, 2004a, forthcoming)

4.      Adstratal influence: In post-co-territorial language situations, to what extent does the linguistic repertoire include features from other languages, including new co-territorial language(s) after migration or language shift? (Weinreich 1980)

5.      Displaced dialectalism: To what extent does the linguistic repertoire include features from other regions within the same language territory (e.g., Moroccan Arabic declensions used by Jews in Egypt, Central Italian vowels used by Judeo-Italian speakers in other regions)? (Hary 2004)

6.      L’havdil factor: To what extent do Jews avoid local non-Jewish features seen as religious (e.g., Yiddish bentshn replaces segenen because of its Christian connotations)? (Weinreich 1980)

7.      Secret language: To what extent do Jews have secretive/humorous/derisive ways of talking about non-Jews, especially using Hebrew words? (Benor in press, Gindin 2002, Jacobs 2005, pp. 279-284) To what extent are secretive ways of speaking crystallized into professional jargons? (Jacobs 2005, pp. 279-284)

8.      Archaisms: To what extent do Jews maintain linguistic features when local non-Jews have shifted away from their use?

9.      Orthography: To what extent do Jews write their language in Hebrew characters (as opposed to the orthography used by local non-Jews)? (Birnbaum 1979)

10.  Textual translation: How widespread is the tradition of translating sacred texts into the vernacular?  To what extent do these translations include word-for-word rendering of Hebrew/Aramaic sentence structure? (Hary 2000, 2004)

11.  Other distinctive features: To what extent does the linguistic repertoire include distinctively Jewish features other than the ones above?  Note that this will vary tremendously from community to community, and all levels of language (including phonology, syntax, pragmatics, discourse, and intonation) must be considered (see Benor forthcoming on other distinctive features of Jewish American English).

Once we analyze these 11 categories of linguistic distinctiveness, we can then ask three general questions:

12.  Overall distinctiveness: How distinct is the language used by Jews from that of local non-Jews?  What is the (estimated, average) location on the continuum of Jewish linguistic distinctiveness? (Gold 1981a, 1989, Prager 1986, Benor forthcoming)

13.  Variation: How much linguistic variation exists within the community? To what extent do Jews speak the local non-Jewish language without distinctive features in certain situations?

14.  Language recognition: To what extent do Jews and non-Jews recognize Jewish language as distinct?  Is there a sense that Jews speak a distinctive dialect of the non-Jewish language or a completely different language?  Is the language referred to with distinctive glottonyms?  Have advocates undertaken status and corpus planning on behalf of the language? (Fishman 1985)

Our answers to these 14 questions can then be correlated with socio-religious characteristics across Jewish communities, with socio-religious variables within a given Jewish community, and with contextual factors within a given speaker.  This way we can incorporate inter-communal, intra-communal, and intra-speaker variation into our understanding of Jewish language.

Socio-religious variables for entire communities (inter-communal variation)

o       Co-territoriality: Does the community speak a variety of a local non-Jewish language, a post-co-territorial language, or both?

o       Openness of society: To what extent are Jews emancipated (being/doing Jewish is a personal choice, not dictated by government policy) or treated as a separate people and subject to residential, financial, occupational, and other restrictions?

o       Demographic distinctiveness: To what extent are Jews different from non-Jews in residence, education, occupation, socio-economic status, birth rates, etc.?

o       Literacy levels: To what extent is literacy in the general society limited to the elite or easily accessible to the masses?  How widespread is literacy in the Jewish community?

o       Political Zionism: Does the community exist before or after the dawn of political Zionism and the birth of the State of Israel?  To what extent does the community participate in political Zionism and have a relationship with the State of Israel?

o       Textual authority: Does the community practice rabbinic or non-rabbinic Judaism?  To what extent does the community study and revere biblical and rabbinic texts?

o       Communal origin: To what extent did the community arise through migration or through mass conversion?

o       Time from immigration: How many generations have passed since the community’s major wave(s) of immigration to its current language territory?

o       Internal migration: To what extent has the community migrated within its current language territory?

o       Jewish population concentration: What percentage do Jews comprise in the local population? (see Verschik 2007 on this factor in the emergence of Jewish Russian and other ethnolects)

Certainly these are not the only socio-religious traits that might be analyzed.  If we get into details of each community’s use of Hebrew/Aramaic, such as which words are borrowed and how they are pluralized and pronounced (e.g., Bunis 1981), we might look at additional correlations.  For example, in Weinreich’s list of socio-religious traits to compare (1980, p. 54), he includes differences in liturgy and interpretation of laws and customs, as well as sources of authority derived from antecedent centers (Babylonia vs. Palestine).

            Another level of analysis is variation within a given community.  Using linguistic variables 1-12, we can determine how individuals’ use of the distinctively Jewish linguistic repertoire correlates with various social and religious variables:

Socio-religious variables for individual Jews (inter-speaker / intra-communal variation)

o       Integration / social networks: How much interaction do they have with non-Jews?

o       Religiosity: To what extent do they adhere to Jewish law and observe Jewish rituals? (see Benor forthcoming)

o       Learnedness: How proficient are they in reading, reciting, understanding, and commenting on Hebrew/Aramaic biblical and rabbinic texts? (see Benor 2004b)

o       Gender (see Isaacs 1999, Bogoch 1999, Held 2004, Benor 2004b, Fudeman 2006, Fader 2007)

o       Ancestral origins: In a community that includes various streams of historical migration, where did their ancestors come from? (see Benor forthcoming on Sephardi and Ashkenazi American Jews)

o       Jewish allegiances: How oriented are they toward various Jewish factions/movements?  This will differ in every era/land depending on local factions, e.g., Sabbateanism, Frankism, Bundism, Zionism, American denominations, Israeli political factions (see Benor 2004a, Fader 2007, Sacknowitz 2007 on variation among different types of Orthodox Jews in America)

Socio-religious variables for different contexts (intra-speaker variation)

o       Audience: To what extent does their intended audience include Jews (including different types) or non-Jews?

o       Topic: How Jewish/religious is the topic about which they are speaking/writing?

o       Setting: How Jewish is the setting of the speech (Jewish setting like synagogue, school, or private home vs. general public) or the venue of the writing (Jewish vs. general publisher/publication)?

o       Genre: Is the given excerpt of language spoken or written?  What genre is it (informal speech, public lecture, newspaper article, poem, novel, etc.)? (see Schwarzwald 2002, 2006 on genre variation in Judeo-Spanish)

Questions like these will enable comparative analysis of Jewish linguistic repertoires around the world and throughout history.  Experts in various Jewish languages might work together to answer these questions, formulate and test hypotheses, and arrive – collectively – at a more nuanced classification of Jewish languages.