1.Introduction

Brown and Gilman (1960)Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman 1960 “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity.” In Style in Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 253–76. Cambridge: MIT Press. established a crucial dichotomy of informal T pronouns versus formal V pronouns, wherein ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’ are the main social and semantic dimensions expressed in address forms. This dichotomy has formed the basis of abundant address systems research globally, with most studies focused on European languages nowadays (Hickey and Stewart 2005Hickey, Leo, and Miranda Stewart 2005 Politeness in Europe. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. ; Clyne et al. 2006Clyne, Michael, Heinz-Leo Kretzenbacher, Catrin Norrby, and Doris Schüpbach 2006 “Perceptions of Variation and Change in German and Swedish Address.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10: 287–319. ; Clyne, Norrby and Warren 2009Clyne, Michael, Catrin Norrby, and Jane Warren 2009 Language and Human Relations: Styles of Address in Contemporary Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Farese 2018Farese, Gian 2018 The Cultural Semantics of Address Practices: A Contrastive Study Between English and Italian. Lanham: Lexington.) and diachronically (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2003Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas Jucker eds. 2003 Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ).

One of the criticisms towards Brown and Gilman’s approach questions the universal nature of this two-dimensional dichotomy, suggesting more complex address systems in many languages (Braun 1988Braun, Friederike 1988 Terms of Address: Problems of Patterns and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ; Agha 1994Agha, Asif 1994 “Honorification.” Annual Review of Anthropology 23: 277–302. ; Cook 2014Cook, Manuela 2014 “Beyond T and V — Theoretical Reflections on the Analysis of Forms of Address.” American Journal of Linguistics 3 (1): 17–26.). Firstly, more detailed works analyzing numerous nominal address forms and other honorifics started to view address organization as a scalar system rather than a binary dichotomy (e.g. about Dutch, see Le Pair 2005Le Pair, Rob 2005 “Politeness in The Netherlands: Indirect Requests.” In Politeness in Europe, ed. by Leo Hickey, and Miranda Stewart, 66–81. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. ; about Portuguese, see Carreira 2009Carreira, Maria Helena Araújo 2009 “Qualification et adresse: complexité modale et enjeux interlocutifs. L’exemple du Portugais.” Synergies Pologne 6 (2): 29–34.). Secondly, the increasing number of languages described with respect to their address systems brought to light languages with more than two grammaticalized modes of address. Helmbrecht (2013)Helmbrecht, Johannes 2013 “Politeness Distinctions in Pronouns.” In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, ed. by Matthew S. Dryer, and Martin Haspelmath. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute. http://​wals​.info​/chapter​/45 observes that these languages are rare cross-linguistically; his database contains fifteen such languages, mainly from South Asia. This might be owing to the fact that small minority languages are not usually examined within address studies (Hajek, Kretzenbacher and Lagerberg 2013Hajek, John, Heinz-Leo Kretzenbacher, and Robert Lagerberg 2013 “Towards a Linguistic Typology of Address Pronouns in Europe — Past and Present.” In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, ed. by John Henderson, Marie-Eve Ritz, and Celeste Louro Rodríguez., 5). Historically, binary T/V address familiar from French, German, Russian, etc. was not the only system in Europe, as many languages in this territory had more than one mode of V address and some of them still display features of a tripartite address system. These include historical varieties of German (Simon 2003Simon, Horst 2003 “From Pragmatics to Grammar: Tracing the Development of “Respect” in the History of the German Pronouns of Address.” In Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, and Andreas Jucker, 85–124. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ; Salmons 2012Salmons, Joseph 2012 A History of German. What the Past Reveals about the Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.), Czech (Kretzenbacher et al.2013Kretzenbacher, Heinz-Leo, John Hajek, Robert Lagerberg, and Agnese Bresin 2013 “Address Forms in Language Contact and Language Conflict: The Curious History and Remnants of onikání in Czech.” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 27 (1–2): 87–103.), Slovene (Reindl 2007Reindl, Donald 2007 “Slovene Ultra-Formal Address: Borrowing, Innovation, and Analysis.” Slovenski jezik — Slovene Linguistic Studies 6: 151–168. ), Polish (Bogdanowska-Jakubowska and Bogdanowska 2021Bogdanowska-Jakubowska, Ewa, and Nika Bogdanowska 2021 “Addressing the Other in Poland (the 20th and 21st Centuries): Different Times, Different Contexts, Different Meanings.” Journal of Pragmatics 178: 301–314. ), Hungarian (Domonkosi 2010Domonkosi, Ágnes 2010 “Variability in Hungarian Address Forms.” Acta Linguistica Hungarica 57 (1): 29–52. ), Portuguese (Lara-Bermejo and Guilherme 2021Lara-Bermejo, Víctor, and Ana Rita Bruno Guilherme 2021 “The Diachrony of Pronouns of Address in 20th-Century European Portuguese.” Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 14 (1): 39–79. ), Italian (Timm 2001Timm, Christian 2001 Das dreigliedrige Allokutionssystem des Italienischen in Neapel: eine Fallstudie anhand von Verkaufsgesprächen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.; Molinelli 2010Molinelli, Piera 2010 “Allocutivi, pronomi.” In Enciclopedia dell’italiano. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani.; Bresin 2021Bresin, Agnese 2021 Address Variation in Sociocultural Context. Region, Power and Distance in Italian Service Encounters. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ), other Romance languages (Da Milano and Jungbluth 2022Da Milano, Federica, and Konstanze Jungbluth 2022 “Address Systems and Social Markers.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics, ed. by Adam Ledgeway, and Martin Maiden, 763–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), etc.

Yiddish is a Germanic language that is believed to derive from the same parent language as Middle High German (Jacobs 2005Jacobs, Neil 2005 Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). It is written in the Hebrew alphabet and contains significant Semitic (Hebrew and Aramaic) and Slavic (Polish, Russian, Ukrainian) lexical components and contact features. Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish is a diaspora minority language used as the main daily language of around 750,000 strictly Orthodox, mostly Hasidic,11.Hasidism is a Jewish spiritual movement that arose in Eastern Europe in the late 18th century. It centres around the figure of a rebbe (spiritual leader). speakers worldwide (Biale et al. 2018Biale, David, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown et al. 2018 Hasidism: A New History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ), with relatively large centers in the USA (the New York area), Israel (mainly Jerusalem and Bnei Brak), the UK (London and Manchester), Canada (Montreal), and Belgium (Antwerp). Diachronically, Yiddish was the everyday language of most Central and East European Jews during roughly the last millennium (Jacobs 2005Jacobs, Neil 2005 Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2) and had over ten million speakers before WWII. In the 1920s–1930s a standard variety of Yiddish, largely based on the Northeastern dialect, was developed. This variety, termed Standard or YIVO Yiddish, now primarily exists within academic settings.

Throughout its history, Yiddish was typically a low language (L) in diglossia with Hebrew (H), while adjacent dominant languages were also used by Jews. In this context, Hebrew–Yiddish diglossia is understood according to Hudson (2002)Hudson, Alan 2002 “Outline of a Theory of Diglossia.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 157: 1–48., who resolves the contradiction between Ferguson’s and Fishman’s approaches (Ferguson 1959Ferguson, Charles 1959 “Diglossia.” Word 15 (2): 325–340. , 1991Ferguson, Charles 1991 “Diglossia Revisited.” Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10 (1): 214–234.; Fishman 1968Fishman, Joshua 1968 “Bilingualism with and without Diglossia; Diglossia with and without Bilingualism.” Journal of Social Issues 23 (2): 29–38. ). My theoretical framework for multilingualism in Yiddish-speaking communities comprises internal diglossia (Hebrew and Yiddish) and external bilingualism (adjacent majority languages used by Yiddish-speakers; Yampolskaya et al. 2024Yampolskaya, Sonya, Izzy Posen, Eli Benedict, and Lily Kahn 2024 “Non-Vernacular Language in Action: Ashkenazic Hebrew in 21st-Century Diaspora Hasidic Communities.” IOS Annual 24: 166–224.). Internal diglossia and external bilingualism remain characteristic of Yiddish-speaking Hasidic communities today.

Only recently has Hasidic Yiddish drawn scholarly attention. Mitchell (2006)Mitchell, Bruce 2006 Language Politics and Language Survival: Yiddish Among the Haredim in Post-War Britain. Leuven: Peeters. described the sociocultural context and institutional frameworks for Yiddish in the UK. Assouline (2017)Assouline, Dalit 2017 Contact and Ideology in a Multilingual Community: Yiddish and Hebrew Among the Ultra-Orthodox. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. investigated language ideology and multilingualism in Israeli communities. Krogh (2012Krogh, Steffen 2012 “How Satmarish Is Haredi Satmar Yiddish?” In Leket: Yiddish Studies Today, ed. by Marion Aptroot, Efrat Gal-Ed, and Roland Gruschka, 483–506. Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press., 2018Krogh, Steffen 2018 “How Yiddish Is Haredi Satmar Yiddish?” Journal of Jewish Languages 6 (1): 5–42. ) studied the written language of Satmar Hasidim in the New York area. Bleaman (2022)Bleaman, Isaac 2022 “Minority Language Maintenance and the Production-Prescription Interface: Number Agreement in New York Yiddish.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 26 (2): 221–245. investigated number agreement in New York Hasidic Yiddish. Assouline (2014)Assouline, Dalit 2014 “Language Change in a Bilingual Community: The Preposition far in Israeli Haredi Yiddish.” In Yiddish Language Structures, ed. by Marion Aptroot, and Björn Hansen, 39–62. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. analyzed Israeli Hasidic Yiddish. Sadock and Masor (2018)Sadock, Benjamin, and Alyssa Masor 2018 “Bobover Yiddish: “Polish” or “Hungarian?”” Journal of Jewish Languages 6 (1): 89–110. described Bobover Yiddish in New York. Belk, Kahn, and Szendrői (2020Belk, Zoë, Lily Kahn, and Kriszta Szendrői 2020 “Complete Loss of Case and Gender Within Two Generations: Evidence from Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish.” Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 23: 271–326. , 2022Belk, Zoë, Lily Kahn, and Kriszta Szendrői 2022 “Absence of Morphological Case and Gender Marking in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish Worldwide.” Journal of Germanic Linguistics 34 (2): 139–185. ) argued for a loss of case and gender in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. This paper is the first to examine politeness distinctions in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish; therefore its focus is on grammaticalized forms, including pronouns and nominal third person address. A more detailed analysis of honorifics is outside the scope of this study.

Standard Yiddish grammars describe a bipartite T/V distinction, similar to that of French, with 2sg and 2pl (du and ir) used as familiar and formal address forms respectively (Mark 1978Mark, Yudl 1978 Gramatik fun der Yidisher klal-shprakh. New York: YIVO., 241; Birnbaum 1979Birnbaum, Solomon 1979 Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar. Manchester: Manchester University Press., 250; Katz 1987Katz, Dovid 1987 Grammar of the Yiddish Language. London: Duckworth., 103–7; Weinreich 1992Weinreich, Uriel 1992 College Yiddish: An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to Jewish Life and Culture. New York: YIVO., 64; Zucker 1994Zucker, Sheva 1994 Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 1. New York: Workmen’s Circle., 8; Margolis 2011Margolis, Rebecca 2011 Basic Yiddish: A Grammar and a Workbook. London: Routledge., 8; Kahn 2012Kahn, Lily 2012 Colloquial Yiddish: The Complete Course for Beginners. London: Routledge., 21). Weinreich (1992)Weinreich, Uriel 1992 College Yiddish: An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to Jewish Life and Culture. New York: YIVO. notes that Hasidim commonly address each other with the T form du, in contrast to Misnagdim,22. Misnagdim are adherents of a rabbinical movement that was historically opposed to Hasidism. who prefer the V form ir (2pl) when addressing someone beyond family and close friends. Zucker (1994)Zucker, Sheva 1994 Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 1. New York: Workmen’s Circle. notes that T forms (du) are used when addressing friends, family members, children, and God, while V forms (ir) are used to address older people, strangers, and higher-status individuals, but that a Hasidic rebbe employs the T form (du) towards his Hasidim. Katz generalizes that when speaking to an adult one usually employs the polite form (ir). Slobin researched the “semantics of social relations underlying the usage of the 2sg/pl pronouns in Yiddish as it was spoken in Eastern Europe before World War II” (Slobin 1963Slobin, Dan 1963 “Some Aspects of the Use of Pronouns of Address in Yiddish.” Word 19 (2): 193–202. , 194). Slobin interviewed twenty-two informants in the USA, all born and bred in East European Jewish communities. His study focused on the binary T/V distinction and did not mention third person nominal address.

My research unequivocally shows that Hasidic speakers are aware of three address modes in Yiddish regardless of their age (7+), gender, location, or particular Hasidic community. As Hajek, Kretzenbacher, and Lagerberg (2013Hajek, John, Heinz-Leo Kretzenbacher, and Robert Lagerberg 2013 “Towards a Linguistic Typology of Address Pronouns in Europe — Past and Present.” In Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, ed. by John Henderson, Marie-Eve Ritz, and Celeste Louro Rodríguez., 5) noted, grammars often lack important details of address systems. In this paper, I present my findings on the synchronic use of address forms in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. I begin by describing my methods and data. I then examine three different address modes, focusing on their morphological and pragmatic traits: third person nominal address, 2pl address to a single addressee, and 2sg address. Finally, I suggest a hypothesis for the origin of the third person address in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. My findings are summarized in the conclusion.

2.Methods

The field research was conducted in 2019–2022 in four stages with different methods applied in each (Table 1). Firstly, I conducted preliminary fieldwork in Stamford Hill (London) and Manchester, which involved participant observation, communication with Hasidic Yiddish speakers, and involvement in communal events, all accompanied by field diary notes. This is when I discovered a tripartite system of address forms, with complex underlying pragmatic and sociocultural norms. Secondly, I conducted nine in-depth biographical interviews in the UK in Yiddish with follow-up questions on address forms (one female, eight male interviewees). Thirdly, questions on T/V distinction were included in a wider field research on variation in the Hasidic Yiddish pronominal system, which was conducted in Israel, Canada, and the USA. The oral pronoun questionnaire included twenty-two questions on nominal and pronominal address forms, designed as translation tasks of short phrases from English or Hebrew into Yiddish (fourteen interviews, nine male and five female interviewees, age range 7–77). These interviews were conducted in Yiddish with casual code-switching to English or Hebrew. Fourthly, I focused on address forms only, developing a written questionnaire with open and multiple-choice questions. The questionnaire was written in Hasidic Yiddish and consisted of seventeen communicative situations. In each situation, there were two different phrases or short dialogues, each represented in four versions of different wording; the task was to choose one or several appropriate versions of each phrase. In addition, each phrase had space for the participant to write a better wording for the given imaginary situation. Questionnaires for female and male participants were different in accordance with Hasidic gender roles. For example, Hasidic boys and girls learn in different educational institutions, with different rules of politeness and address forms (discussed below; see also Yampolskaya et al. 2024Yampolskaya, Sonya, Izzy Posen, Eli Benedict, and Lily Kahn 2024 “Non-Vernacular Language in Action: Ashkenazic Hebrew in 21st-Century Diaspora Hasidic Communities.” IOS Annual 24: 166–224.). During the task, an interviewer either recorded the discussions on the choice of address form or made notes of the interviewee’s comments (nineteen participants, nine female, ten male, aged 7–58). Overall, there were forty-two active participants in the study. When oral data was transcribed, it was summarized together with written data and participants’ comments. While analyzing the results, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to reach some of the participants and check my conclusions with them.

3.Data

Traditionally Yiddish had three major geographical dialect areas (Katz 1987Katz, Dovid 1987 Grammar of the Yiddish Language. London: Duckworth., xxi; Jacobs 2005Jacobs, Neil 2005 Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 65; Weinreich 2007Weinreich, Uriel 2007 “Yiddish Language.” In Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd edition, vol. 21, ed. by Michael Berenbaum, and Fred Skolnik, 332–338. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA., 335). Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish, by contrast, has two co-territorial phonological variants: the ‘vus’ variety, sometimes also called Satmar33. Satmar is now one of the largest Hasidic groups. Yiddish, and the ‘vos’ variety (see Belk, Kahn and Szendrői 2022Belk, Zoë, Lily Kahn, and Kriszta Szendrői 2022 “Absence of Morphological Case and Gender Marking in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish Worldwide.” Journal of Germanic Linguistics 34 (2): 139–185. , 144–5). I have retained each participant’s phonological features when transcribing the examples. YIVO transliteration is used for the romanization of Yiddish and for a few Hebrew examples as well.44.See https://​www​.yivo​.org​/yiddish​-alphabet

Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish distinguishes three different modes of address. I discuss each mode separately, contrasting its use with the other two. When presenting the findings, I divide the communicative situations inherent to each mode into two groups: the primary use and the secondary use. The first section covers communicative settings that strongly require a particular address mode across the Hasidic Yiddish-speaking communities in various locations. When these norms are violated, it either causes problems for the speaker or bears specific meaning in communication and is not perceived as neutral address. The second group contains communicative settings wherein the conventions of appropriate address are less rigid and less widely accepted; the norms described in these sections vary depending on the particular Hasidic community, institution, or family.

When I analyze pragmatic and semantic principles underlying the choice of an address mode, operating with etic concepts of ‘face’ from Brown and Levinson’s (1987)Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. politeness theory, ‘power’ and ‘solidarity’ by Brown and Gilman (1960)Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman 1960 “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity.” In Style in Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 253–76. Cambridge: MIT Press., Watts (2003)Watts, Richard J. 2003 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., and others, I take into account key Hasidic Yiddish emic concepts, detecting them in conversations with my participants at all fieldwork stages. At the last ‘check-up’ stage my participants approved these emic concepts as relevant for the given address modes.

Because of the tripartite nature of the politeness distinction in Hasidic Yiddish, the traditional dichotomy of T and V forms (Brown and Gilman 1960Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman 1960 “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity.” In Style in Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 253–76. Cambridge: MIT Press.) needs to be adjusted. I designate 2pl addressed to a singular addressee as V2 and 3sg/pl address forms (singular for one addressee and plural for more than one) as V3, while 2sg address is indicated by the traditional T symbol, as in Table 2.

As evident from Table 2, when addressing multiple addressees, the polite form (V2) coincides with the familiar form (T); in both cases, the address pronoun is ir and the verbal forms are 2pl. In contrast, the V3 polite forms differ depending on the number of addressees: the verb exhibits distinct morphology (either 3sg or 3pl), and the address noun indicates either singularity or plurality.

4.V3 address forms (3sg or pl)

The nominal V3 address is attested historically in various European languages. Middle High German had a basic dichotomy of T (du, 1sg) and V forms (ir 2pl). In the sixteenth century, V3 nominal address forms became fashionable in German to express extreme politeness, e.g. der Herr, meine Schöne, etc. The nominal address was often replaced by anaphoric pronouns, e.g. er (3m.sg), and the old ir-forms were still used alongside the new nominals even in the same utterance (Simon 2003Simon, Horst 2003 “From Pragmatics to Grammar: Tracing the Development of “Respect” in the History of the German Pronouns of Address.” In Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, and Andreas Jucker, 85–124. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 95–6). A somewhat similar picture is observed in fifteenth-to seventeenth-century Czech, where the V pronoun vy (2pl) was used together with nominal address in the third person Tvá Milost, Vaše Milost, and later pán (Betsch 2003Betsch, Michael 2003 “The System of Czech Bound Address Forms Until 1700.” In Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, and Andreas Jucker, 125–146. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ). In Polish, V address forms are expressed with the noun pan/pani and a 3sg verb. In the nineteenth century, V address forms in 2pl became more frequently used in Polish, while the address nouns could be used with either 2sg or 3sg verbs (Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak 1998, 47–48).

Similarly, Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish displays the use of nominal third person address in polite contexts. However, as will be shown below, the use of V3 address in Hasidic Yiddish differs from the languages discussed above: unlike Middle High German, anaphoric pronouns do not replace nominal V3 forms; unlike German, Czech, and Polish, Yiddish V3 forms are consistently used with third person verbs, and there is normally no switch to V2 address in the same dialogue.

5.V2 address forms (2pl)

6.T forms of address (2sg)

A rebbe who is a friend or relative and comes to visit a speaker at his house is normally addressed in V3. God, conversely, is always addressed with the intimate T pronoun. Apart from the cases described above, T address is reciprocal and signifies solidarity. My participants interpret T address as heymish ‘homey.’ This solidarity is particularly significant in same-gender communication and is not appropriate in intergender interaction unless it involves close relatives. For instance, recently a friend of mine invited me for shabbes to his parents’ house, a Karliner Hasidic family. On our way to their house, I was instructed how to address the hosts: V2 for the father (to follow the principle of distance between genders) and T forms for the mother to signify gender solidarity, despite the generation gap and the fact that this would be our first meeting.

Interestingly, both oral interviews and written questionnaires indicate that reciprocal T forms are commonly used in communication with unacquainted people if they do not fall into any of the above-discussed categories that require a V3 or V2 address: passers-by, customers in a store, market traders, fellow passengers on a bus, people walking in a park, new neighbors, etc. In all these cases, most participants suggested the T address, which does not fit the usual expectations based on European languages with T/V distinction, where V forms are typically applied to strangers. Example 35 is from the multiple choice task (stage 4), 36 is from the translation task (stage 3).

This contradicts Slobin’s (1963Slobin, Dan 1963 “Some Aspects of the Use of Pronouns of Address in Yiddish.” Word 19 (2): 193–202. , 198) findings on pre-War Yiddish. In his research, twenty respondents indicated V2 address to unfamiliar collocutors, while only two respondents suggested T pronouns.

More broadly, Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish is not the only language used in Hasidic communities. The distinction between the Hasidic and non-Hasidic worlds is fundamental for the Hasidic mindset. Yiddish is understood, employed, and explicitly discussed as a ‘wall’ surrounding and protecting the Hasidic world. Hasidim use different external languages when talking to ‘others’ but Yiddish by definition is applied to and expected from only ‘our people.’ Choosing Yiddish for communication presupposes that a collocutor is not a total stranger, but rather a fellow member of the same in-group of Yiddish-speaking Hasidim. That is, the reciprocal T address of solidarity unifies Hasidic Yiddish speakers within their respective gender groups.

7.A hypothesis of the origin of V3 in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish

The origin of the tripartite T/V distinction in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish as described in this paper is a separate question that requires a full-scale investigation. In this section, I will outline a possible perspective for such future research.

First, it is important to note that Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish and pre-War Yiddish alike co-exist with Ashkenazic Hebrew in diglossic framework. Yiddish is the low language in the diglossia, used as a vernacular and as a written medium for non-prestigious texts, mainly targeted at children and women. Ashkenazic Hebrew is the high language, employed in high-status and formal texts central to Hasidic male culture. Traditional Ashkenazic Hebrew had a stable binary T/V distinction traceable to at least the sixteenth century, whereby V forms were expressed by third person nominal address or third person anaphoric pronouns, especially in the possessive and objective case (Yampolskaya 2016Yampolskaya, Sonya 2016 “Samples of Everyday Speech in a Dead Language: Russian Phrasebook in Hebrew of the 19th Century.” Forum for Anthropology and Culture 29: 38–65., 2021Yampolskaya, Sonya 2021 “Evidence of a T/V Distinction in European Hebrew.” Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 7 (1): 123–150. ). In the nineteenth century, Ashkenazic Hebrew V3 forms were not associated with religious culture (as they are now) and were widely used e.g. in business correspondence, original fiction, and literary translations. Example 37 is from Joseph Hayim Brenner’s (1924Brener, Yosef 1924 החטא וענשו: רומן בששה חלקים עם אפילוג [Crime and punishment: A novel in six parts with epilogue]. Warsaw: Stybel., 225) translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, depicting a dialogue between Raskolnikov and an old lady pawnbroker:

Contemporary Israeli Hebrew does not have a T/V distinction. However, during my fieldwork in Hasidic communities, I found that V3 address forms are still in use in Ashkenazic Hebrew, especially in formal and private correspondence with authoritative male figures. The set of social roles that require V3 address in contemporary Ashkenazic Hebrew is very similar to the one used in Hasidic Yiddish, as outlined in Section 4 above: rebbe, maged shir, menahel, dayen, etc.

Second, a significant difference in V3 address morphology between Hasidic Yiddish and Ashkenazic Hebrew is that Yiddish does not allow anaphoric pronouns in V3: only nominal address is permissible even in objective and possessive cases throughout a long dialogue, despite persistent repetitions inevitably produced by the ‘noun only’ address. Conversely, Ashkenazic Hebrew widely employs pronouns instead of an address noun.

Third, classical Yiddish is known as a language with a binary T/V distinction with T vs V2 address, and to the best of my knowledge, no V3 address forms are mentioned in the vast linguistic literature on Yiddish. Slobin’s (1963)Slobin, Dan 1963 “Some Aspects of the Use of Pronouns of Address in Yiddish.” Word 19 (2): 193–202. research on T/V distinctions in pre-war Yiddish lacks V3 forms too. A brief overview of Yiddish fiction and plays does not reveal a developed V3 address system;1616.For example, in the famous play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds by Ansky, rabbis are addressed in V2 forms. however, more thorough research into this issue is needed. Individual cases of V3 address in pre-War Yiddish can be found. For instance, the traditional Yiddish greeting vos makht a yid? ‘how are you?’ (lit. ‘how is a Jew?’) can be attributed to V3 address. Another example is a quotation from a Yiddish folksong (Kipnis 1923Kipnis, Menahem 1923 פאלקס לידער 08 [80 folk songs]., 66), in which a gabbai addresses a rabbi in the third person.

Considering these three arguments put together, I tentatively assume that V3 address is a recent development in Hasidic Yiddish. Indeed, numerous dialogues in Yiddish literature that I examined contain a V2 address or more rarely T address to a rabbi, but none of these is deemed appropriate within contemporary Hasidic communicative norms. Another fact supporting this hypothesis is the participants’ total rejection of anaphoric pronouns in any V3 form without exceptions. Avoidance of anaphoric pronouns in V3 address in Hasidic Yiddish may indicate that V3 address is in an early stage and has not yet fully developed its deictic force, while the social function of a specific address to express deference has been well established. The presence of V3 address forms in Ashkenazic Hebrew might have shaped the concept of metaphorical ‘absentisation’ (coined by Simon 2003Simon, Horst 2003 “From Pragmatics to Grammar: Tracing the Development of “Respect” in the History of the German Pronouns of Address.” In Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, and Andreas Jucker, 85–124. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. , 96)1717.Describing third person address in Middle High German, Simon notes that “on a symbolical plane this is an instance of metaphorical ‘absentisation’”, since referring to an addressee in the third person gives him/her the opportunity to construe the address as referring to someone else (Simon 2000, 96). My participants expressed something close to ‘absentisation’ when asked to interpret the V3 address. Their explanations involved a metaphorical ‘wall’ dividing a speaker from an addressee, the former assuming that he is not visible to the latter. There is a related metaphor in the Hebrew grammatical term for the third person, nister ‘hidden,’ known from the Middle Ages. The term nister implies that a person who is discussed is out of the speaker’s sight. as a linguistic device to convey the semantics of high respect, which was transferred into Yiddish. My hypothesis is thus that the V3 address used sporadically in classic Yiddish as a figure of speech turned into a full-scale address mode in the second half of the twentieth century, rearranging the whole binary T/V distinction into a tripartite system. Additionally, the emergence of V3 address forms in Hasidic Yiddish could have been reinforced by Polish (Bogdanowska-Jakubowska, Bogdanowska 2021Bogdanowska-Jakubowska, Ewa, and Nika Bogdanowska 2021 “Addressing the Other in Poland (the 20th and 21st Centuries): Different Times, Different Contexts, Different Meanings.” Journal of Pragmatics 178: 301–314. ) and Hungarian (Domonkosi 2010Domonkosi, Ágnes 2010 “Variability in Hungarian Address Forms.” Acta Linguistica Hungarica 57 (1): 29–52. ), as both contained active third person nominal address in the early twentieth century and were co-territorial languages in areas from which most contemporary Hasidim are descended.

8.Conclusion

The examination of address forms in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish reveals a tripartite system. V3 and V2 address modes encode two essentially different types of social interaction, each with its own set of pragmatic conventions, rather than two alternative forms of polite/formal address.

V3 address is only nominal (e.g. der rebe) and cannot be replaced with an anaphoric pronoun, even in the objective and possessive cases. For example, in the translation task when asked “how would you say in Yiddish ‘your book,’ when talking to a rebbe?” participants give the translation der rebe’s bukh ‘the rebbe’s book.’ V3 serves as a linguistic device to express and maintain relations of social status. That is, the V3 mode conveys the semantics of deference (koved) in a power relationship, which is obligatory in the male Hasidic world. The rebbe is the central concept of an authority figure requiring deference and, accordingly, V3 address. This concept is mirrored on the lower levels of the social hierarchy (dayen, maged shir, rosh yeshive, menahel, etc.) via male educational and scholarly institutions. In some families, V3 forms are customary when addressing a grandfather or father. Women are not commonly exposed to interactions with important male figures. In some girls’ schools, V3 is required for important teachers and the director, which might be an innovation in Hasidic female education. Parents-in-law of both genders are unique, towards whom both male and female participants report V3 as a desirable (but not obligatory) address.

Pronominal V2 address forms are compulsory for men and women alike in intergender communication when the interlocutors are not relatives, to mark distance and thus to protect the face of an opposite-gender addressee (tsnies). V2 is desirable but not mandatory towards elderly people to show proper behavior (derekh erets). Both functions can be generalized as the semantics of consideration, which differs essentially from deference, expressed by V3. There are also minor cases of V2 use towards teachers in girls’ schools, a context that signifies power relations but seemingly excludes deference. Thomas (1995Thomas, Jenny 1995 Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Harlow: Longman., 150) differentiates deference from politeness as a matter of showing respect vs showing consideration towards an addressee. In Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish, these pragmatic meanings are built into the grammatical structure of two different address modes: V3 expresses deference and V2 conveys consideration.

The T address form is the default one. It is used for relatives, friends, same-gender acquaintances, and even strangers. The reciprocal T address of solidarity unites all Hasidic Yiddish speakers within each gender group. The analysis of T-form pragmatics in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish shows that the dimension of familiarity is rather ulterior. This is explained by the multilingual nature of close-knit Hasidic communities, where familiarity levels are determined by language choice, i.e. the decision to communicate in Hasidic Yiddish suffices to include a stranger within the speaker’s in-group.

My hypothesis on the origin of V3 address in Hasidic Yiddish is that it emerged in the second half of the twentieth century by analogy with a similar address in Ashkenazic Hebrew. The rejection of anaphoric pronouns in any form of V3 address supports the assumption that V3 address is a new development in Hasidic Yiddish.