The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic History

by Bernard Spolsky

Jewish historical sociolinguistics is rich in unanswered questions: when does a language become 'Jewish'? What was the origin of Yiddish? This book presents a vivid commentary on Jewish survival and Jewish speech communities, investigating difficult questions about language varieties and choices in speech and writing.

Genres: Language, Linguistics, Judaism

376 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2014

About the author

Bernard Spolsky was educated at Wellington College and Victoria University and received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Montreal.

He has been the head of the English Department, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Director of the Language Policy Research Center at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he is currently Professor of English.

Bernard Spolsky has conducted and published research in language testing, second language learning, computers in the humanities, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and language policy. He has been President of TESOL, held a Guggenheim fellowship and a Mellon fellowship, and has been Senior Research Fellow at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington.

He has written several books for Oxford University Press: Conditions for Second Language Learning, Measured Words and Sociolinguistics.