Using Yiddish: Language ideologies, verbal art, and identity among Argentine Jews

Abstract

This essay focuses on the struggle among conflicting language ideologies that occurs in immigrant communities. Specifically, it analyzes verbal art performed in Spanish and Yiddish among secondgeneration Argentine Jews, the offspring of Eastern European Jews who emigrated to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the prevalence of Spanish in daily communication and the use of Hebrew as an emblematic language, Yiddish is still used in certain poetic speech forms. This analysis addresses the effects of contradictory language ideologies—hegemonic and otherwise—on the performance of verbal art and on performers’ reflections about their speech forms.