Linguae Europaeae

Is Yiddish on a Path to Extinction? By Juliana Ramirez Juliana Ramirez recently graduated with an Accounting degree and French minor from the University of Illinois. In the Spring of 2016, Juliana took French 418 to learn about the minority languages in Europe and finish her French minor. In the near future, she will start a summer internship at an Accounting firm in Chicago and come back to Champaign in the Fall of 2016 to pursue a Masters in Accounting. One of the most predominant languages of the Jews up until a century ago is on a path to extinction. Yiddish, which originated as early as the 9th century, provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with an extensive Germanic based vernacular fused with elements taken from Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as from Slavic and Romance languages (Jewish Generation) of the particular linguistic environment. The language is primarily native to Central, Western, and Eastern Europe, Israel, and regions with high Jewish populations. As part o...

Internet Interference: The Linguistic Ambidexterity of the World Wide Web and the Dying Languages By Rebecca Demski Rebecca Demski wrote this blog entry for the course “Language and minorities in Europe” (FRIT 418) in Spring 2016. She is a sophomore in Communications at UIUC, and is particularly interested in telecommunications and linguistics. It’s no mystery that the introduction of the Internet in the 1990s revolutionized the world; its genesis was akin to that of the printing press. Communications were an obvious target susceptible to change and with communications, so to, languages. Approximately 3 billion people have access to the Internet (Chang). A little less than half of the global population has formed and made a digital footprint, so to speak, simply by means of existing. What about the other three-fifths? The other excluded 4.2 billion people are threatened because they have no voice in the ‘conversation’ amongst users taking place. Only about 300 of the 7,100 la...