This study uses data from the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe to compare the acoustic correlates of the length contrast in the peripheral vowels of two regions within the Central Yiddish dialect area: central Poland, considered the more conservative variety, and the Transcarpathian Unterland, hypothesized to have diverged from Polish Yiddish in the prewar period. Findings reveal smaller duration differences in [iː] versus [i] and [aː] versus [a] among Unterland speakers compared to speakers from Poland, with a gender effect in the Unterland showing smaller duration distinctions among women. The duration difference in [uː] versus [u] is significantly smaller than the other vowel pairs in both regions, likely reflecting its ambiguous phonemic status. Vowel quality shows no systematic differences between the two regions. The findings point to the possible influence of population mobility, dialect mixing, geopolitics, and multilingualism on vowel systems.

This paper discusses the hitherto undocumented wh-ever constructions in contemporary American Hasidic Yiddish. Employment of these Germanic constructions in both written and spoken American Hasidic Yiddish raises the question of their origin and the possibility that several Germanic varieties have influenced this seemingly new pattern. Specifically, these constructions might have originated from German-ized Yiddish varieties and past contact with Judeo-German, and then gradually become entrenched in American Hasidic Yiddish through contact with English. The paper uses this particular construction to offer some more general reflections on the possibility of historical impact of German on American Hasidic Yiddish during the formation of Hasidic Yiddish varieties in Williamsburg (New York) in the 1950s.*