Article published in:
Germanic Heritage Languages in North America: Acquisition, attrition and change
Edited by Janne Bondi Johannessen † and Joseph C. Salmons
[Studies in Language Variation 18] 2015
► pp. 217–233

How Synagogues Became Shuls

The Boomerang Effect in Yiddish-Influenced English, 1895-2010

This paper introduces the “boomerang effect,” the resurgence of substrate features that were previously on the wane. Among American Jews, Yiddish loanwords have waned and waxed over the past century, and in the domains of religion and popular culture, we currently see increased use of certain loanwords, including shul (‘synagogue’), leyn (‘chant Torah’), daven (‘pray’), and chutzpah (‘gall’). This paper offers evidence for this trend using data from a survey about language use, a corpus study of the American Jewish press from 1895 to the present, and analysis of media oriented toward young Jewish adults. These findings are discussed in light of changes in American society and in the Jewish community, as well as the notion of the “third-generation return.”
Keywords: American Jews, boomerang effect, ethnicity, Jewish English, lexicon, loanwords, newspaper, substratal influence, substrate effect, survey, Yiddish
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 20 August 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.10ben
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Bagwell, Angela, Samantha Litty & Mike Olson
2019.  In Keeping in Touch [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 10], Crossref logo
Kahan Newman, Zelda
2015.  In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 178 ff. Crossref logo
Litty, Samantha, Jennifer Mercer & Joseph C. Salmons
2019.  In Processes of Change [Studies in Language Variation, 21], ► pp. 115 ff. Crossref logo
Oudesluijs, Tino
2021. Sandra Jansen & Lucia Siebers (eds.): Processes of Change. Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English (Studies in Language Variation 21) . Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 7:1 ► pp. 157 ff. Crossref logo
Salmons, Joseph C. & Thomas Purnell
2020.  In The Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 361 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 october 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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