The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe: Goals, Methods, and Applications

Abstract

We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures, registers and styles, prosody, cospeech gestures, and other topics. Because the survivors represent a socially and geographically diverse cross-section of Yiddish-speaking society, their testimonies are an invaluable resource on the language as it was transmitted from generation to generation before the genocide of European Jewry. This article outlines the CSYE development workflow and highlights use cases for its materials in linguistic research and other domains.