The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish

This is the first systematic attempt to trace the beginnings of Modern Literary Yiddish. It examines hitherto neglected Yiddish books from the late eighteenth century in order to analyse the linguistic changes manifest in both the transition and shift from Old to nascent Modern Literary Yiddish within the broader context of genre and literary tradition and in the framework of Yiddish dialectology, grammar, and sociolinguistics. As such, it represents an important contribution to the study of the crystallization process of literary languages.