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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I still see lots of orthodox Jewish speakers of Yiddish here in Brooklyn, NY; I even sometimes see their small kids speaking Yiddish, though pretty rarely.

The language is definitely not dead yet. I am not Jewish in any way, so my exposure is random encounters on the street / in parks, unlikely an overestimation.

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"not dead yet" is a good summery. The trajectory is very clear.

Nah this isn't true. Among Haredi Jewish communities it's still very often the mame loshn (mother tongue), and they're growing in number.

Secular Yiddish has been having a revival for a couple of decades, but to me it seems like more of an academic object of study than a living language, like it is for the Haredim.

On the secular Yiddish side, I don’t know anyone of my generation (holocaust +2) that speaks it even haltingly. Just maybe a few words and phases more than the average goyishe New Yorker.

The prior generation is a mixed bag but I have no relatives that had it as a first language. I have an uncle that’s fluent enough to listen to podcasts and the like, but he’s in his mid 70s.

Fluency was near universal in the generation before that (i.e. people alive during the holocaust), but from what I understand even in Europe before the war it was common by then to also know another language—-German, Russian, Polish, Etc.

Don't doubt that you don't know anyone secular who does, but there is a very vibrant secular Yiddish revival scene out there where you could meet people who do. For example

https://www.yivo.org/

https://www.yiddishnewyork.com/

https://klezkanada.org/

https://www.centre-medem.org/

https://www.jmi.org.uk/event/otazoyonline2021/

To name just a few.

I mean there are people out there that speak Esperanto fluently. It’s a question of how many. A few people’s (very cool) hobby isn’t the same as a living language.

If you had to guess, what would you say the percentage of American Jews under the age of 45 who are not and never been haredi speak Yiddish fluently?

<0% ! It's obviously collapsed (khurbn, assimilation, Zionism ).

That said, for those who are part of the secular yiddish 'revival' it doesn't matter if there isn't a huge speaker base. Its still an interesting and exciting environment to be part of, and a real counterpoint to the nationalist, orthodox and assimilationist alternative ways of being a Jew today.

there's an american "yiddish" (yinglish one might say, or "yeshivish" in certain contexts, but I'm arguing for a more generalized version) that is common amongst american jews. a mixture of english, hebrew, yiddish, aramaic that is such a part of who they are, that they have to make a conscious effort to code switch when talking to non jews and when Israelis speak english, it just sounds foreign to them. (i.e. while american jews know what the "bible" is, that is not going to be a common term used in internal communication (feels "christian") and would probably say torah or tanach depending on the context. But when an Israeli speaks english, they generally just translate into english (or perhaps speak more standard english) to the point that it sounds foreign to the american born jews' ear.

There are more native speakers of Yiddish today than there were 10, 20 or 30 years ago. The trajectory is going in the opposite direction.

But they are only using it as a colloquial language, don't they? Is there significant amount of literature and media made in yiddish by native speakers? This used to be the case in Europe before the holocaust.

They do produce literature - newspapers, magazines, posters, songs, plays, books, commentaries, and even films (Fill The Void being the pinacle), etc. But no, I don't think anyone would say this rivals the quantity and quality of the arts during the high point of Yiddish culture in the interwar period. Then again, who knows, maybe in the future they will?

They do, I'm thinking of certain Ultra Orthodox sects (not all, but Skver for example). Most of their literature is religious in nature (the plays of Sholem Aleichem would be anathema to them), and religious books are traditionally written in Hebrew (Tseno Ureno is a notable exception, but it seems the author intended it for those who aren't scholars).

But the point is that it is silly to talk about Yiddish being a dying language when it has so many native speakers with a very high birth rate (if I recall correctly approximately half the population are under the age of 18).

When the Jewish culture I grew up in disappears, which seems inevitable at this point, I wonder if there will be some other secular Jewish community in a steady state driven by inflows from off the derech haredi and outflows to assimilation.

take Israel, there are people that consider themselves "datlash" (dati l'she'avar, formerly relgious). They are a distinct subgroup from chilon (secular) israelis, as their religious upbringing is very much a part of who they are. The question will be, what will happen to their children.

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