While the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community embraces the use of Yiddish in many households, even a child growing in a Yiddish-only home uses Hebrew words in various contexts. The proposed research aims to explore language development and maintenance patterns in Yiddish and Hebrew in light of the community's unique sociolinguistic characteristics. Which psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors impact the use of Yiddish and Hebrew among children in the Haredi community? What is the role of language contact and linguistic policies at home or school? These questions are at the heart of the current proposal.

Yiddish-Hebrew speakers among Haredim in Israel, share unique socio-linguistic practices using Yiddish for daily communication, as a boundary between their own in-group identity and the Israeli out-group identity. The community’s view of Yiddish, the in-group language (IGL),  as a key element of their in-group identity enhances social segregation and motivates a separate education system with Yiddish as a means to perpetuate tradition and maintain social identity, as opposed to the out-group language (OGL) Hebrew, the official language of Israel. Despite the large numbers of children in this community, and the communities’ unique sociolinguistic characteristics, research on their language/s development in this contact situation is scarce. The proposed study adopts an in-group/out-group approach to sociolinguistic identity with an overarching objective to explore developmental patterns in Yiddish and Hebrew to fill the apparent gap. Data from boys and girls aged 3;6-6;6, will set the baseline for future studies of typical and atypical language development. 

Two main objectives will be addressed in this study: (1) characterize the psycholinguistic skills of Yiddish-Hebrew bilinguals in terms of various spoken linguistic modules in both languages (phonology, lexicon, morphosyntax, and narrative discourse- expressive and receptive) in order to establish baseline profiles of language development in the context of these communities. (2) identify the sociolinguistic factors contributing to language development and language maintenance, such as, Yiddish-Hebrew language contact in formal/informal settings, characteristics of the Haredi communities investigated, family language policy, and attitudes (affective, behavioral, cognitive) towards the IGL and OGL.

Preliminary results support the use of an integrated IGL-OGL psycholinguistic-sociolinguistic approach to bilingual development and maintenance. Yiddish-Hebrew speaking children show Yiddish dominant bilingualism, reflecting support of Yiddish both at home and in school, while Hebrew is acquired “on the go” from external circles. From a psycholinguistic perspective, narrative analyses and parent reports show unique patterns of cross-linguistic influence at lexical and grammatical levels, for example, in differential patterns of codeswitching in narratives, between the two languages and between boys and girls. From a sociolinguistic perspective, father’s occupation as opposed to the well documented effect of mother’s education, has an impact on OGL use. These preliminary results highlight the potential of harnessing the in-group/out-group approach to sociolinguistic identity as the optimum way to investigate the interaction between the diverse language development and maintenance patterns and the home and community sociolinguistic identity and attitude as well as further impacting the study of other multilingual communities.