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Isaac L. Bleaman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and an affiliate of the Center for Jewish Studies. His research interests include sociolinguistic variation and minority language maintenance. He addresses these broad areas by analyzing how individuals and communities speak and write in Yiddish. He recently received a 5-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a corpus of conversational Yiddish from video-recorded Holocaust survivor testimonies. Bleaman holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Linguistics from New York University, an M.St. in Yiddish Studies from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in Linguistics and Comparative Literature from Stanford University.
Chaya Nove is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the linguistics department at the University of California, Berkeley, working on the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE). She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and has received funding from the Association for Jewish Studies and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her primary research centers on variation and change in New York Hasidic Yiddish, her native language. Nove's current project investigates regional variation in Central Yiddish vowels using data from the CSYE.
In this article manuscript, we introduce a new corpus (digital language archive) for Yiddish, consisting of media files and time-aligned transcripts of Holocaust survivor testimony interviews. The corpus allows researchers, language instructors and students, and members of the public to become acquainted with the linguistic diversity of Yiddish-speaking society before the Holocaust: its regional dialects, grammatical structures, registers and styles, intonation, co-speech gestures, and other topics. We discuss the steps taken to develop the corpus, including the workflow for creating and publishing transcripts, and highlight its potential for research on sociolinguistic variation and language change. We gratefully acknowledge the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education for its support of this project. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-2142797 and by the Society of Hellman Fellows Fund and Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowships at UC Berkeley.
