Famed writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, “Yiddish may be a dying language, but it is the only language I know well. Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead.”

For years we’ve heard that Yiddish is a dying language. In fact, Isaac Bashevis Singer made his comment 30 years ago, and he wasn’t the first to think it. So what’s happening? Is Yiddish really dying out? Vi a mol (it depends, sometimes one, sometimes another).

“Technically, a dead language is one in which new speakers are no longer coming on board,” explains Debra Biasca, a PhD in linguistics at CU. “That’s not the case with Yiddish,” she says. In fact, there are people whose native language still today is Yiddish. And they’re not your grandparents, either.

Biasca says she’s met people in their 20s whose native language is Yiddish. “I’ve heard people in Boulder speaking Yiddish to their kids,” she says. “It’s not dying out, but it’s not doing great.”

While there are still some fluent Yiddish speakers in Boulder, the community has shrunk over the years, if not in size then in participation. The Boulder Yiddish Vinkl, founded in 1993, was once very active, boasting a couple hundred people on the mailing list. The club met regularly for 10 years, sponsoring weekend long learning events and Yiddish film festivals. But since 2003, the Vinkl has gone the way of Yiddish — it’s floundered, if not quite vanished.

Nationally, several universities offer programs to study Yiddish as a language like Spanish or German.

There’s an international association of Yiddish clubs (http://www.derbay.org/iayc.html) where you can connect with beboyner yidish-reder (native Yiddish speakers) in other cities.

And if you don’t know Yiddish but want to learn, you can practice with a native speaker through a language exchange program offered over the Internet (http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/Learn/Yiddish.asp).

There are about 250,000 native speakers left in the world. While that number is down considerably from its pre-WW II figure of 6.5 million, it’s enough for a renaissance.

In fact, that rejuvenation has already begun; Yiddish, at least some of it, has seeped into our common language to the point that it is understood by a large group of people. From oy to bagel, schlepp to schmeer, Yiddish has become common enough to use in the media, and pervasive enough to warrant commercial items displaying Yiddish words and phrases.

And then there are the words that only a linguist would be able to detect. “Benediction has the same root as the Yiddish word bentshn,” says Biasca. They both refer to blessing. Similarly, davnen, which means “pray,” descended from the same Latin root as the English word devotion. And it doesn’t stop there. Leyenen in Yiddish means read, which shares its root with the Spanish word, leer.

So whether it’s the Boulder Vinkl’s footprint making an impression on the community, or John Stewart weaving the words into his shtick, Yiddish has a long way to go before becoming kaput.

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