Whose Yiddish is richer? DEBORAH STONE meets two researchers surveying Americans and Australians to compare their familiarity and usage of Yiddish words

WE DON’T WANT to noodge you but be a mensch and do a mitzvah for a couple of language mavens. They’d love you to get off your tuchus and complete this survey about the use of Yiddisher words in English.

If you are Jewish, you probably understood much of the above paragraph, even if you don’t speak Yiddish or Hebrew. To what extent non-Jewish people have also absorbed Jewish vocabulary into their English language usage is a question which interests linguists Emma Breslow and Caroline Hendy.

The two doctoral students at the University of Hawaii are currently surveying Americans and Australians, Jewish and non-Jewish, to compare their familiarity and usage of Jewish terms. They would prefer you to fill in their survey before you read the rest of this article so your language isn’t primed by discussion of their work. (It takes about 20 minutes.)

Breslow and Hendy come to their interest in Jewish English from opposite directions. Breslow is a Jewish American who grew up in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Her mother, who had lived in New York, often dropped Yiddish words into conversation but the young linguist-to-be was initially unaware that her mother’s vocabulary was not part of standard American English.

“I remember I was in middle school, and I was talking to my friends about plants. There’s a weed called vetch and I said something about how we always kvetch about vetch and my non-Jewish friends just looked at me. It was the first time I realised that it wasn’t an English word.”

A non-Jewish Australian, Hendy’s introduction to Jewish vocabulary, on the other hand, came when she met her husband Daniel, who is Jewish and grew up in Melbourne.