Plural allomorphs in Yeshivish English: a case study of sociolinguistic variation in loanword integration

Abstract

Yeshivish English, a subcategory of Jewish English spoken by some Orthodox Jews, incorporates thousands of loanwords from Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, and Yiddish. Loan nouns in Yeshivish English sometimes take plural morphemes from Hebrew, Yiddish, or English, in seemingly free variation. In this thesis, I analyze 902 Orthodox Jews’ acceptability ratings of various plural forms for 22 loan nouns. I conclude that Yeshivish English speakers use a variety of phonetic and morphological strategies to pluralize loan nouns, but that some nouns exhibit more variation than others. In some cases, pluralization strategies are motivated by demographic factors, such as a speaker’s linguistic background or religious identity, or by linguistic factors, such as a noun’s phonotactic properties. Many participant comments expressed a belief that some allomorphs were associated with certain demographic characteristics. Many participants also reported codeswitching between different allomorphs depending on their interlocutors’ identities. This thesis, which highlights an understudied speaker community, has implications for the classification of Yeshivish English as a Jewish language and as a language contact phenomenon.