Abstract
This study examines the production and use of the rise-fall contour by three Yiddish/English bilinguals in a small American Jewish community. Acoustic analysis shows that the Yiddish rise-falls have higher peaks, larger rise spans, and later Tonal Centers of Gravity compared to a similar intonational contour in English. These results hold for all three speakers despite their diverse linguistic histories. Additionally, evidence is provided that rise-falls with higher peaks have social meaning in both languages. English rise-falls are produced with higher peaks during meetings of a local Yiddish club than during one-on-one interviews, and rise-falls with high peaks are used in both Yiddish and English during an exchange in which one of the speakers discusses his relationship to Passover. The social meaning of the phonetically extreme rise-falls is posited to be the reason why all three speakers have either successfully acquired or maintained phonetic distinctiveness between their English and Yiddish.
Introduction
In 1956, Uriel Weinreich contributed a brief, but highly informative, article entitled “Notes on the Rise-Fall Contour” to a Festschrift for Roman Jakobson. The article outlined the general form and functions of an intonational pattern used in Yiddish, as well as some speculation on the origin of the contour, and its use in English.
True to the ideas outlined in his book Languages in Contact (1953), Weinreich considers both the psychological facts about the bilingual individual and the broader societal effects in discussing the rise-fall’s entry into English and its fate. He claims that interference from Yiddish was the origin of the rise-fall in English (“It is only natural that bilingual Yiddish speakers should apply the convenient rise-fall pattern to constructions of other languages”; Weinreich 1956:642). After this point, social factors played the primary role in the rise-fall’s becoming a part of (Jewish) English, with some inhibiting its use (e.g., negative attitudes about the “musical” nature of Jewish speech) and others promoting its use (e.g., the use of the rise-fall by comedians, both Jewish and not). In the end, the latter forces won out, and a linguistic pattern that was the source of mockery in some situations became the “ideal material for slang utilization elsewhere” (Weinreich 1956:643) and spread. However, as a result of the negative attitudes, the rise-fall as used by Yiddish speakers was often “flattened” outside of what Weinreich called “culturally intimate settings.”
The rise-fall remained a part of Jewish English and Yiddish, as other linguists have observed. The rise-fall was one of many features of the “Orthodox Jewish English Style” acquired by newly Orthodox Jews in Philadelphia (Benor 2012), and Newman (2000) provided a detailed description of the rise-fall’s use in Yiddish and its potential relationship to Talmudic chanting patterns. However, both of these studies focused on the rise-fall’s use by Orthodox speakers, as well as on the use of the rise-fall in areas with larger Jewish communities. To what extent can we see the use of the rise-fall both in smaller communities and among non-Orthodox speakers?
This article follows these other studies by providing a detailed look at the use of the rise-fall among non-Orthodox Yiddish heritage speakers. This work also contributes to the small, but growing, literature on variation in intonation in the United States. Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered from sociolinguistic interviews and participant-observation of a local Yiddish club in Dayton, Ohio, this study investigates (1) the phonetic differences between the rise-fall in Yiddish and a similar contour in English, and (2) the extent to which Yiddish speakers, even those who have experienced some degree of language attrition, make use of a phonetically distinctive rise-fall in culturally intimate settings. The findings show that, even in a smaller community with a dwindling number of non-Orthodox Yiddish speakers, a phonetically distinct rise-fall is still a part of both the Jewish English and the Yiddish found there.
Variation in Intonation
This work is conducted under auto-segmental/metrical (
There are several ways in which we may see variation in the intonation system, both cross-linguistically and within a language. Ladd (1996) divides this variation into four categories: systemic, phonotactic, semantic, and realizational. Systemic variation refers to differences in the types of tones present in intonational systems, while phonotactic refers to differences in how these tones are associated with the segmental string (for example, in English, pitch accents are associated with stressed syllables; languages without lexical stress can show different association patterns, e.g., phrase accents associating with accentual phrases). Past research on Jewish English has not uncovered any additional pitch accents (which would suggest systemic variation) or additional levels of prosodic phrasing (phonotactic variation) (Burdin 2014), so these two types of variation will be not be explored further in this article.
Semantic variation covers differences in what meanings are signaled by the same or similar tones. Note that Ladd’s use of “semantic” here is quite broad: he uses it to describe things like variation in the signaling of questions vs. non-questions and also differences in how the meanings of the contours are interpreted in context as being, e.g., condescending.
Realizational variation refers to differences in the phonetic implementation of the same or similar phonological categories. There are numerous parallels in the segmental system, both looking at cross-linguistic and system-internal variation. Within the United States in particular, there is a long line of modern sociolinguistic research concerned with this type of variation stretching back to Labov (1966), in which researchers look at phonetic differences in the implementation of the same vowel category. Similarly, there have been several studies concerned with this type of variation in intonation, including research into variation in the production of rising pitch accents within and across Germanic languages, including Dutch, German, and British English (Atterer & Ladd 2004; Grabe 1998; Ladd et al. 2009; Mücke et al. 2009), with some similar studies looking at dialectal variation within American English (see, e.g., Reed 2016).
In addition to this cross-linguistic variation, we may also see interference (using Weinreich’s term) or imposition (van Coetsem 1988) of the phonetic implementation patterns of one language on another in the speech of bilinguals, as has been well-observed in segments (e.g., Flege, 1981). Research shows similar effects for intonation. De Leeuw et al. (2010) examined differences in the phonetics of rising pitch accents in bilingual German/English speakers in Canada, and found differences between these speakers and both monolingual German and monolingual English speakers. There were considerable individual differences here, with some speakers looking like English monolinguals in both their German and their English, and most speakers ending up with an intermediate system (i.e., neither German-like nor English-like) in both their German and their English, indicating bi-directional imposition. Mennen (2004) found similar results in Dutch/Greek bilinguals in terms of an overall pattern of bi-directional imposition, but also considerable interspeaker variation, with some showing more clear influence of Dutch on Greek, and vice versa. Considering that Yiddish imposition seems to be responsible for other differences in Jewish English (e.g., certain lexical borrowings and syntactic structures), it would not be surprising that, if there are differences in phonetic implementation between Yiddish and English in rise-falls, we may see effects of Yiddish on English in bilinguals.
These differences then might take on social meaning, as speakers use those features to construct particular identities and personae. Again, parallels may be found in studies of stylistic variation in the phonetic implementation of phonological segments. For example, several studies have been done on different phonetic realizations of /t/, with released variants used by a gay lawyer (Podesva et al. 2001), as well as white politicians (Podesva et al. 2015), white nerd girls (Bucholtz 2011), young, Reform Jews (Levon, 2006), and Orthodox Jewish men (Benor 2001). Although these studies all approached phonetic variation in a categorical, rather than continuous manner, other studies have found continuous differences (e.g., Podesva 2004, looking at burst length) in different situations, with those differences proposed to be a feature of different styles.
As such, we also expect that phonetic variation in intonation is also available for stylistic use by speakers, and some previous research has suggested that this is the case. Podesva (2011) looked at the use of different intonational contours by three gay men, and found variation in those speakers’ production of falling contours, depending on context. One participant, Heath, used phonetically extreme falls at a barbeque with friends to signal a “flamboyant ‘diva’” persona, in contrast to the “caring doctor” persona he used in a professional setting. In another study, Holliday (2016) found that men with one black parent and one white parent had later peak delay (which is proposed to be a feature of African American English) when talking with a black interlocutor compared to when they spoke with a white interlocutor.
As such, we expect that we may find (1) differences between Yiddish and English in bilinguals’ phonetic implementation of phonological categories and (2) imposition of Yiddish patterns on English in some situations. Finally, (3) we may expect to find that Yiddish-influenced forms have social meaning and are used in the construction of Jewish identity.
Differences between the Yiddish and English Rise-fall
Weinreich (1956) describes both realizational and semantic variation in the use of the rise-falls, both within Yiddish and between Yiddish and other languages. For semantic differences, Weinreich discusses the rise-fall’s functions in Yiddish, of marking certain question types and “dramatic transitions.” He first describes variation in the rise-fall’s use within Yiddish, with some dialects using it to mark a wider range of question types than others, and then variation in how the rise-fall is used in Jewish English compared to Yiddish, with it having a “slangy, humorous” meaning in the former but not the latter. Here, then, we see evidence for semantic variation in how the rise-fall is used and what it means. This article will focus on the social function of the rise-fall, and argue that the rise-fall has a particular social meaning within the community studied.
For realizational differences, Weinreich says that the form of the rise-fall is more “musical” than contours found in other languages. There is also the discussion of the Yiddish rise-fall being “flattened,” with the non-flattened version being “culturally intimate” (642). However, he provides no acoustic evidence for these differences (understandably, given both the length of the article and the available technology at the time). This article provides this evidence, and shows (1) inter-language differences in the form of the rise-falls, and (2) variation within Yiddish (and also English) in the form of the rise-fall, depending on the social context.
Methodology
This study primarily consists of (1) an acoustic analysis of the rise-fall contour described by Weinreich in Yiddish and English, and (2) a detailed analysis of the use of a phonetically distinct version of the rise-fall by one participant in a group setting. The data come from a larger study of the Jewish English- and Yiddish-speaking communities in Dayton, Ohio, focusing on members of a local Yiddish club, described in more detail in Burdin 2016. The data come from audio recordings of Yiddish club meetings and one-on-one sociolinguistic interviews conducted over two years. This study thus also provides a novel account of Jewish English intonation in an understudied community. We can potentially assume that, if the rise-fall is still being used here, it might also still be in use in other mid-sized Jewish communities throughout the United States with a similar history of Jewish settlement to Dayton.
The Participants and Community
There have been Jews in the Dayton area since at least the mid-1800s. Much like other cities in Ohio (e.g., Cincinnati, as described in Schaengold 2005), the first wave of Jewish settlement was primarily German-speaking, with later waves being primarily Yiddish-speaking. The Jewish population grew to about 7,000 individuals in the 1970s (Fine et al. 1976); however, since then, the population has declined, with there now being between 2,000 and 4,000 Jews in the metropolitan area (Weiss 2011). The number of Yiddish speakers has likewise declined. Although the historical census data on language use are inconsistent, in 1970 around 1,000 people reported hearing and speaking Yiddish in childhood (
Dayton thus provides an interesting test case for what happens to Jewish English features in smaller communities with declining numbers of Yiddish speakers, and in communities not on the East or West coasts. Previous work on phonetic and phonological variables of Jewish English in the United States suggests that, in some cases, we do see use of these features in these types of communities. For an example, we can look at caught raising, a feature of New York City English (with Yiddish potentially having had an indirect influence on this variable; see Labov 1966). Knack (1991) found that the Jewish community in Grand Rapids, MI, unlike their non-Jewish neighbors, also showed caught raising, speculating that connections with New York City might be the source; Benor (2011) found Jewish speakers were more likely to report the use of features of New York English, even when parental connections to New York City were controlled for.
The Yiddish Club
The participants were recruited from a local Yiddish club, which is associated with the International Association of Yiddish Clubs. Yiddish clubs exist across the United States, in various forms; for more on Yiddish clubs and various other groups in the
There was a range of Yiddish-speaking abilities among the club members. A handful of the members had little to no knowledge of Yiddish, outside of a few vocabulary items, and were present at the meetings mainly out of an interest in Yiddish language and culture more broadly. The bulk of the regular members were the children of immigrants, whose parents spoke Yiddish, and who had spoken Yiddish in the home as children, but had experienced language attrition to varying degrees. A few of the members came to the
Meetings were generally organized around a guiding theme, usually involving some aspect of Yiddish or Jewish culture or history. Themes of the meetings I attended included “The Yiddish Theatre,” “Passover,” and “Sholem Aleichem.” At each meeting, the leader, a role that rotated among the regular members, would present information on the topic, or each participant would be asked to share personal stories related to the topic. For these more formal portions of the meeting, efforts were made to present information in both Yiddish and English, with another member translating. The meetings also tended to begin or end with the singing of Yiddish songs, or some basic vocabulary review (e.g., parts of the body, Yiddish idioms). However, side conversations, as well as comments or interjections, were often in English.
The meetings seem, intuitively, to be one of these culturally intimate spaces referred to by Weinreich. The participants appeared to be largely at ease with each other, even when new members came to the meetings, and freely gossiped and chatted about goings-on in the Jewish community, both in Dayton and in the world as a whole. The club members also clearly make up a community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992). A community of practice involves a group of people coming together for some common purpose; these communities can be both formally defined by, e.g., membership in a club (as in the situation here), as well as more informally (e.g., regular participants in a pub trivia competition). The community of practice includes both the members and the practices, including linguistic practices, that those members engage in. In this case, the linguistic practices of the club include things like, using Yiddish-influenced structures in English, and talking about Yiddish life and culture.
The meetings were also more culturally intimate compared to the one-on-one sociolinguistic interviews, which were conducted with seven of the group members. Although I had been interacting with the club members for over a year at the time of the interviews, and was in some ways an insider (since I was Jewish, interested in Yiddish, and regularly came to the club meetings), in other ways, there was a certain degree of social space between the members and me, particularly in terms of age. My relative youth was a common talking point: when seeing me at the meetings for the first time, attendees would often express (pleasant) surprise that someone so young was there. The difference between the club members and me was most clearly highlighted during one session, when the club members were collaborating on writing a fake letter from an immigrant to his/her relatives back home. They decided (without my input) that the letter writer should have a granddaughter named Rokhele (a diminutive of my Yiddish name), who was studying mame-loshn at the university on a full scholarship, of whom they were very proud. The letter presented me both as an insider (as I was a member of the family) but also an outsider, in that I was from a different generation.
This reaction was not unexpected: in her work on Yiddish in Southern California, Avineri (2012) writes about similar reactions to her youth by older Yiddish speakers, and tensions of being both an insider and outsider, connected to metalinguistic narratives about Yiddish and age. As such, there was some social distance between the participants and me, and a one-on-one meeting with me, as opposed to a group meeting with their peers, would be a less culturally intimate setting.
The interviews followed the style of a traditional sociolinguistic interview, in which several styles were collected, in both Yiddish and English. The structure and general topics were the same for all of the subjects. First, the participants were asked (in English) about their life in Dayton and elsewhere, as well as their perceptions about speech in Ohio and Jewish speech in general. Then (still in English), the participants were asked to tell a story about a time when something went wrong during a holiday celebration. They then narrated a wordless picture book, Frog, Where are You? (Mayer 1969). Finally, they completed a Discourse Completion Task, in which subjects were presented with a brief scenario and asked to produce an utterance in response, as if they were in that scenario. The participants then completed these last three tasks in Yiddish (with a different book by the same illustrator, A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog; Mayer 1967).
There are also linguistic differences between the Yiddish Club meetings and the interviews. The Yiddish club had a good deal more code-switching and mixing, as the participants moved in and out of Yiddish, whereas in the interview, the English portions and Yiddish portions were clearly blocked (although the participants did occasionally use a Yiddish word or phrase during the English portion, and asked clarification questions in English during the Yiddish portion).
This study looks in detail at three of the members. They are all prominent club members in the core of the group who attended nearly every meeting I went to, and were the most fluent in Yiddish of the club members who agreed to be interviewed one-on-one. The first was Ira.1 Ira was born in Sarny in 1936, which was then in Poland. His family moved to the Urals, and he received formal schooling in Russian and used Russian outside of the home, but he reported continuing to speak Yiddish with his mother and other Jewish families. Following the war, his family briefly returned to Sarny, before moving on to a Displaced Persons camp in Austria, where Ira learned German and Modern Hebrew (as they were initially going to be resettled to Israel). The family arrived in New York when Ira was 16; at this point, he began acquiring English. He lived in the eastern United States for many years and moved to Dayton in the 1980s.
The second subject, Joe, was born in Cincinnati in the late 1920s, to parents who were born in Kiev and eastern Ukraine (he did not provide a more detailed location). Joe reported hearing and using Yiddish both in the home and in his neighborhood (Avondale) during childhood, and also during his time in the
The final subject, Sarah, was born in New York City in the 1950s and grew up there in the Bronx. She attended a Yiddish language school (the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute), which is where the majority of her Yiddish acquisition took place. She is thus the only one of the three to have formal instruction in any variety of Yiddish; she also is the only one who received instruction in Standard Yiddish. Sarah moved to Dayton in the early 1980s, also to the northwest part of town.
These speakers all have very different language backgrounds. Ira is perhaps the strongest candidate for seeing interference effects of Yiddish onto English, as he learned Yiddish first, and then English later in life. Impressionistically, although he is fluent in English, his English has a slight Yiddish accent. Joe is the closest out of the three to a simultaneous bilingual; however, English became socially and linguistically dominant fairly early in his life, and, as can be seen in more detail below, he showed significant interference effects from English onto his Yiddish in multiple parts of the linguistic system. Sarah used Yiddish in the smallest range of settings out of the three, self-reporting that she used it primarily in school and in some family settings. Due to these differences, we might expect to see variation in the degree to which their Yiddish influences their English, especially as past research on the phonetics of L2 prosody has found a wide range of individual differences (see, e.g., Mennen 2004).
Phonetic Analysis
In order to examine differences in the phonetic realization of the rise-falls in Yiddish compared to English, as well as differences within both languages, it is necessary to first identify which rise-falls we are looking at. The general procedure is similar to studies that explore differences in the phonetic realization of the same underlying vowel phoneme: first, we have to identify all instances of what we believe to be the same or similar phonological category in both languages. Although I will refer to a particular intonational contour (a rise-fall), recall that it is, underlyingly, a sequence of a pitch accent and boundary tones (which are hypothesized to be phonological categories in
Weinreich (1956:635) describes the rise-fall as having a peak located in the syllable after the stressed syllable. His spectrogram confirms this, at least in questions, with the rise-fall entirely contained in the second (unstressed) syllable of tones ‘fast day.’ However, later descriptions of the rise-fall, both in Yiddish and English in non-question contexts, either explicitly describe the peak of the rise-fall as being associated with the stressed syllable (Benor 2004:186) or indicate as much through the placement of tonal indicators (e.g., Newman 2000:315). I follow these later two descriptions, leaving open for now the question of the discrepancy. In English, then, the rise portion of the rise-fall is created by the use of a rising pitch accent which is ToBI annotated (Beckman & Ayers Elam 1997) as L+H*.
Weinreich says that the extent of the fall of the rise-fall “varies.”2 However, Weinreich included several “tadpole” sketches of the rise-fall which seem to indicate that the fall likely drops to the middle of a speaker’s pitch range.3 The closest equivalent in English, then, would be !H-L%, which indicates a fall to the middle of a speaker’s pitch range.
In English, the rise-falls under investigation here are thus those which are ToBI annotated as L+H* !H-L%, consisting of a rise to a peak in the stressed syllable, followed by a fall to the middle of the speaker’s pitch range. In Yiddish, for which a full ToBI system has not yet been developed, the rise-falls extracted match these general phonetic characteristics.
Extracting the Rise-falls and Phonetic Measurements
The English portions of the interviews were orthographically transcribed using
Four phonetic measurements of the rise-falls were then extracted. The first was peak height, in f0, marked on the figure as H. The second was rise span, which was the difference between the f0 of the peak height (H) and the preceding valley (L1). A schematic of these measurements is shown below in Fig. 1. Weinreich described the Yiddish contour as more musical than similar ones in other languages. He also described the contour as being flattened in non-intimate settings (in Yiddish), indicating that a prototypical rise-fall has a wider rise-span and/or a higher peak. We thus expect that the Yiddish rise-falls will have higher peaks and wider rise-spans than the English rise-falls. In both languages, peaks should be higher, and rise-spans wider, in the Yiddish club setting compared to the interview (as the Yiddish club meeting is a more culturally intimate setting).
The last two are measurements of contour shape: peak offset and Tonal Center of Gravity (TCoG). Peak offset is defined here as difference in seconds between the location of H and the onset of the stressed syllable (the beginning of the tier marked with an “s” in Fig. 1 below). The larger the peak offset, the later the peak. As noted above, peak location has been found to vary within and across other Germanic languages, so it would not be unexpected to see variation on this parameter between Yiddish and English.
F0 tract, with phonetic land marks.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
F0 tract, with phonetic land marks.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
F0 tract, with phonetic land marks.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Weinreich’s (1956:642) examples of flattened contours suggest that there may be variation in the overall contour shape (with some having more or less scooped rises, or more or less gradual falls). Tonal Center of Gravity (TCoG) is a time-weighted measurement of f0 within a contour, potentially capturing differences in contour shape (Barnes et al., 2010). If we imagine the f0 contour as, e.g., a piece of bent wire in a mobile, the TCoG would be the balance point. The formula for calculating TCoG is given below in (1). A later TCoG indicates that there is more high f0 later in the contour (or that there is more low f0 material earlier in the contour).
F0 measurements were extracted by use of a semi-automated script4 in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2016) which allowed the user to hand check the measurements and, where necessary, adjust the settings. After this initial extraction, the rise and fall spans were calculated. Any token which had a negative rise or fall span, or rise or fall span that was calculated as being under 5Hz, was double checked.
To calculate TCoG, an automated script5 extracted f0 at 300 individually spaced points between the points marked L1 and L2 on Fig. 1. The script used the “Smooth” and “Extrapolate” tools in Praat to adjust for any non-sonorant portions of the contour.
Results
Statistical Modeling
Linear mixed-effects models were built predicting (1) peak height, (2) rise-span, (3) peak offset, and (4) TCoG using the lme4 package (Bates et al. 2015) in R (R Core Team 2013). Linear mixed-effects modeling is a statistical method which allows the research to see the effect of a multiple variables (fixed effects) on the variable of interest, while accounting for things like individual differences (random effects). For example, in this study, the three subjects, two male, and one female, have very different pitch ranges. A larger pitch range allows for more variance compared to a smaller pitch range, and so, we might expect both a higher overall range for the female speaker (accounted for via by-speaker random intercepts), and a greater difference based on language or setting (accounted for via random slopes by language and setting).
Each model initially included fixed effects for the language (Yiddish or English), the setting (interview or Yiddish club), and interactions between the two. Interactions allow the researcher to test the combined effects of two or more variables: in this case, we can see whether the combined effect of language and environment (e.g., speaking Yiddish in an interview) differs significantly from the independent effect attributed to each factor. The models also included random intercepts by speaker, as well as random slopes by language and setting. Log likelihood tests were then used to step down the model to find the best-fit model for the data. That is, the models with and without a particular effect were compared; if the model fitness was significantly worse, the effect was retained in the model. If not, it was removed. This step-down procedure led to different models for each variable studied, as detailed below in each section.
The reference level for language was English; for setting, the interview. Significance was assessed using log likelihood tests of the model with and without the effect (as can be seen in the column labeled “Pr > | χ2|” in the tables below). For main effects that were also present in interactions, factors with a t value of >|2| (the columns labeled “t value”) were taken to be significant.6
Peak Height
The final model for peak height included fixed effects for language, setting, and an interaction between the two, with random intercepts by speaker. The model summary is shown below in Table 1.
As expected, Yiddish peaks were significantly higher than English peaks (by about 36 Hz, as can be seen by the estimate in Table 1). This is illustrated in Fig. 2, with the results separated by speaker. Peaks were significantly higher in the Yiddish club setting compared to the interview setting, as well. Finally, there was a significant interaction between language and setting, where the difference between Yiddish and English was smaller in the Yiddish club setting than in the interview setting. As can be seen in Fig. 3, this appears to be primarily driven by the English peaks shifting higher in the Yiddish club settings.
Model summary for peak height
Cross-linguistic differences in rise peak height (Hz) by speaker.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Cross-linguistic differences in rise peak height (Hz) by speaker.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Cross-linguistic differences in rise peak height (Hz) by speaker.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Rise peak height differences by language and setting for each speaker.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Rise peak height differences by language and setting for each speaker.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Rise peak height differences by language and setting for each speaker.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Model summary for rise span
Rise Span
The final model included language as a fixed effect and random intercepts by speaker. The model summary is shown above in Table 2.
Rise spans were larger in Yiddish compared to English. This effect can be seen below in Fig. 4. These results are perhaps not surprising, particularly given the difference in peak heights above. Due to the logarithmic perception of pitch, a rise-fall produced at a higher frequency would need to have a slightly larger rise, in raw Hz, to be perceived as covering the same range as a rise-fall produced at a lower frequency. Rise-falls with higher peaks, then, should have wider rise-spans. However, the difference in rise spans remains significant when the models were run using measurements converted to equivalent rectangular bandwidth (
Peak Offset
There were no significant effects for language or setting on peak offset. It is possible that a lack of careful control over segmental material may be obscuring differences between the languages; more data from read speech would need to be gathered to see if this is the case.
Tonal Center of Gravity
The final model includes language as a fixed effect and random intercepts by speaker. The model summary is shown above in Table 3.
As can be seen in Fig. 5, Tonal Center of Gravity was later in Yiddish compared to English. This meant that Yiddish rise-falls had more high f0 later in the rise-fall (or, alternatively, more low material earlier). A later TCoG could be caused by several factors, including a more scooped rise, more gradual fall, or a later peak; this last explanation can be ruled out by the non-significant difference in peak location between the languages.
Rise span by language and speaker.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Rise span by language and speaker.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Rise span by language and speaker.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Model summary for Tonal Center of Gravity
Tonal Center of Gravity location, by speaker and language.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Tonal Center of Gravity location, by speaker and language.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Tonal Center of Gravity location, by speaker and language.
Citation: Journal of Jewish Languages 5, 2 (2017) ; 10.1163/22134638-05021184
Phonetics Summary and Discussion
As predicted, there were interlingual differences between the rise-falls in Yiddish and English. Yiddish rise-falls have higher peaks, larger rise spans, and later Tonal Centers of Gravity compared to similar English rise-falls. These differences between Yiddish and English are likely what led to Weinreich’s impressions of the Yiddish rise-fall being more musical.
Somewhat surprisingly, we can see these differences between the English and Yiddish for all three of these speakers, despite differences in the age of acquisition of Yiddish and English, and the setting in which they learned Yiddish. It does not seem to be the case that, e.g., Joe shows extreme English interference on his Yiddish intonation, or for Ira, Yiddish on his English, which would have shown up in the form of, for example, having the same peak height in both languages. Instead, all three of the speakers had different means for Yiddish compared to English, and in all cases, the Yiddish peak height was higher than the English peak height.
There was also an effect of setting, wherein the difference in peak height between Yiddish and English was smaller in the Yiddish club setting compared to the interview setting. This appears to be driven primarily by the English rise-falls becoming more Yiddish-like, in having higher peaks, during the Yiddish club meetings, as can be seen in Fig. 3. This shift gives acoustic evidence for the flattening of the rise-fall, at least in English, in a less culturally intimate setting (the interview).
There are two other potential explanations beyond the social meaning of the rise-fall for this shift. The first is that a greater activation of Yiddish during the Yiddish club meetings caused temporary interference effects on English. As noted above, during the interview, the English and Yiddish portions were more neatly divided, with the first part of the interview being conducted in English, and the second in Yiddish. There was more frequent code switching between Yiddish and English during the club meetings.
The second is that the existence of higher peaks might be due to the participants in general being more relaxed in the Yiddish club setting, and the higher peaks might be due to more physiological effects. For one thing, the interview setting itself was somewhat more formal than the meetings, and participants were likely more aware of their speech. During the interviews, participants wore a head-mounted microphone that was attached to a small recorder during the interviews, which occasionally needed to be adjusted; during the Yiddish club meetings, a small, fairly inconspicuous recorder was placed in the middle of the table. As such, it is possible that this shift was due to the subjects, in general, being more relaxed and monitoring their speech to a lesser degree during the Yiddish club meetings compared to the interview (and as a result, having larger f0 ranges).
However, the fact that the Yiddish of the participants looks somewhat consistent from the interview to the meeting is an argument against this being a more general shift towards higher f0 values in group compared to interview settings. The following section provides additional evidence for a specific link between rise-falls with higher peaks and the signaling of Jewish identity. As such, even if the higher peaks are due to interference caused by the greater activation of Yiddish in these settings, rather than a reflection of stable variants present in the Jewish English repertoire, I still argue that these higher peaks are socially meaningful, regardless of their ultimate source.
The Use of Phonetically Extreme Rise-falls
The following examples all come from one meeting, held close to Passover. There were around fifteen members present, and as was typical, the club members and I were sitting around a large table in a meeting room of a local coffee shop. Each member of the club told a brief personal story about a Passover experience, with other members translating the stories into English or Yiddish, depending on what language the member decided to use. At the end, the participants sang some songs.
When Joe told his Passover story, he used one rise-fall, given in example (2), with the location of the rise-fall indicated in bold.
This short line shows some of the effects of English interference in Joe’s Yiddish. For one example, we see the use of the word gedenkt ‘thought,’ instead of gemeynt, which is preferred in Standard Yiddish. An interlingual identification between denken and English think likely contributes to Joe’s use of the word instead of meynen. (Joe again uses denken a few more times in the exchange shown below in example (4) and is even briefly corrected on it.) We can also note some evidence of attrition in the form of leveling, e.g., in the use of the masculine dative yenem instead of the feminine yener.
Despite this evidence of English interference, Joe’s use of the rise-fall in this context on the word tsayt is native-like, in both its form and its use. This example is a rise-fall marking what Weinreich calls a “dramatic transition,” fairly similar to the one described by Weinreich (1956:634), reproduced in example (3). Here, the rise-fall on the bolded word, tog ‘day,’ connects two clauses, and adds something like the meaning in brackets, adding a contrast to the two different time periods (with emphasis as in the original).
We see a similar opposition in example (2), with a contrast between what Joe thought when he was a child and what he thinks now. However, the rise-fall is not simply serving to highlight an opposition and make a transition more dramatic: the rise-fall here, which was produced with an unusually high peak for Joe (199 Hz, compared to an average of 127 Hz across both languages) is also likely to be socially meaningful.
The Maxwell House Haggadah (
Joe’s reference to the
The rest of Joe’s rise-falls from the meeting came entirely from the exchange outlined in (4). Note, again, that he does show a considerable amount of English interference here, some of which gets addressed by both Ira and Sarah (including denken vs. meynen) and some grammatical errors throughout; however, his use of rise-falls throughout, indicated in bold again, is native-like, and is discussed in more detail below. This exchange occurred at the end of the meeting, as things were winding down and other people had already told their stories. Joe began this exchange by briefly talking about the miracles described in the Haggadah, and then posed the question in line 1.
Joe starts out being somewhat confrontational, by questioning the authenticity of the Passover story, when the meeting had been about members’ celebrations of Passover. While other members, most notably Sarah, had described somewhat areligious Seders, Joe is taking it a step further, by more explicitly calling into question the veracity of the Passover story, even somewhat dismissively referring to it as a sheyne maysele ‘a nice little story.’ He gets some (good natured) pushback on his question, with laughter in response to it, and another club member responds “You shouldn’t ask questions!”
In line 11, he produces his largest rise-fall in his corpus (“The important thing of the Seder”) right before he gets into the meat of the exchange, his discussion of “miracles.” Again, this is a rise-fall on a dramatic transition; like the other dramatic transitions, he’s setting up a contrast. Here, it’s between two ways of looking at the Seder: the first, as a literal recounting of the Exodus from Egypt, and the other, a more metaphorical discussion of “freedom.” For him, then, the Passover Seder is also concerned with the modern movements of Jewish people, including migration to the State of Israel. We see this emphasized again with his second highest rise-fall in line 40, where he states that that me lebt in undzer lifetime, nokh a nes ‘we live—in our lifetime, another miracle,’ again drawing a connection between the events recounted during the Seder and the modern day.
We can contrast these rise-falls with the less extreme rise-falls, which occur in the middle of the passage, as Joe is listing various countries. The rise-falls decrease in peak height at this point, part of which might be accounted for by the fact that here he mostly falls back into English (most likely due to lexical gaps; although the Yiddish words for these countries are quite close to the English ones—e.g., Sirye, Levonen—it is unlikely that he heard them much as a child).
However, the use of rise-falls in this listing environment is also likely due to Yiddish influence and also functions as a marker of Jewish English: both Ira and Sarah use rise-falls on lists in both Yiddish and English in other parts of the corpus, and other work has found an increased use of rise-falls (in English) on lists like these, by speakers similar to Joe (heritage Yiddish speakers who are now mostly dominant in English; Burdin 2014). Thus, Joe’s use of the rise-falls in these lists is at least somewhat socially meaningful (in that they are potentially Yiddish-like); however, the lowered peaks likely give them less salience than the rise-falls with higher peaks (and, in fact, although it is not transcribed above, Ira and Sarah can be heard chatting quietly to each other in the background at this point about meeting logistics, indicating less attention from the group).
The most phonetically extreme rise-falls occur at points when Joe is making a strong claim about Jewish identity and about what the Seder means to him (notably, the background chat ceases at this point). At these moments, like his line about the
Discussion and Conclusion
This article first provided acoustic evidence for Weinreich’s observations about the interlingual differences in rise-falls. The Yiddish rise-falls have higher peaks, wider rise-spans, and later Tonal Centers of Gravity compared to English rise-falls. This finding is expected; however, it is remarkable that we can see these differences even in three speakers who all primarily use English in their day-to-day life, and, in some cases, show language attrition (as can be seen by the significant English interference in Joe’s example).
I argue that this finding can be explained by the social meaning of higher peaks. This was first hinted at in the use of higher peaks in English during the Yiddish club meetings than during the interviews. It was also discussed in connection to Joe’s use of rise-falls with higher peaks, in both Yiddish and English, in his statements about his relationship to the Passover Seder and about his Jewishness. It is not clear why the high peaks in particular have been adopted; it may be the case that the higher peaks are simply the most acoustically salient of the three differences between the two languages; or, possibly, that we might see use of the other features (rise span, TCoG) in other contexts, although further experiments would be necessary to test this.
The social meaning of higher peaks in both Yiddish and English would potentially make the acquisition of this aspect of Yiddish prosody easier for a Jewish L2 learner like Sarah, and the maintenance of the feature easier for native speakers like Joe and Ira. If the Yiddish-like rise-falls are in frequent use in English in settings like the Yiddish club, they could reinforce the connections between these rise-falls and Yiddishness, and subsequently, Jewishness, and make them more salient. A parallel could be found in lexical items: a Yiddish L1 speaker is unlikely to forget a word like nakhes ‘pride’ due to its social salience in English even after undergoing significant language attrition. A Yiddish language learner familiar with Jewish English may also acquire the word quite easily, since the word is often used in the construction of Jewish identity (see, e.g., Benor 2011). Likewise, the social meaning of a phonetically extreme rise-fall may help maintain a difference between Yiddish and English intonation in these speakers.
It remains to be seen if the rise-fall will still be used in Jewish English fifty years from now, but it is certain that parts of Weinreich’s notes from sixty years ago remain true today, even in smaller communities.
Rachel Steindel Burdin
(PhD, 2016) is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of New Hampshire. Her primary research interest is on variation in intonation, with a focus on Jewish English.
Footnotes
* Many thanks to Brian Joseph, Cynthia Clopper, and Don Winford for their advice and guidance on this project; to Jordan Maier and Virginia Fisher for their aid in data extraction; Rochelle Lieber for comments on this manuscript; and my participants. This research was partially supported by a fellowship from the Ohio State University Melton Center for Jewish Studies, and by
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Some of the participants wished to be identified by name, and others anonymized; as such, some names given are the participants’ real names, while others are pseudonyms. In order to better protect those who wish to remain anonymous, the real names and pseudonyms will not be distinguished.
He also states that the fall is “more extensive” than a # would indicate in Trager-Smith notation. This statement is not particularly helpful, as, as shown in Ladd (1978), even those trained in this system had considerable difficulty in agreeing in the use of the #.
The drawings were called tadpole drawings because they have dots indicating syllables, and lines, which makes them look somewhat like stylized drawings of a tadpole.
Thanks to Rory Turnbull for providing the initial scripts which were the models for this script; the script can be found at https://goo.gl/644z5S.
Thanks to Tuuli Morrill for providing this script.
p values could not be computed for the main effects via model comparison. Models with effects present in interactions necessarily include models with the main effects present in those interactions. As such, it was not possible to do a model comparison between a model that had the main effect and the interaction to a model with only the interaction.
Note that not all side conversations and interruptions are transcribed, as not all are intelligible. In the transcript, the following conventions are used:
