Yiddish Alphabet & Letters

Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazi Jews for about a thousand years, is a Germanic language with many words of Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic origin, and it is written in Hebrew letters, from right to left, with no capital letters. Yiddish speakers call the alphabet the alef-beys. In the standard order taught by YIVO it runs א אַ אָ ב בֿ ג ד ה ו וּ װ ױ ז ח ט י יִ ײ ײַ כּ כ ך ל מ ם נ ן ס ע פּ פֿ ף צ ץ ק ר ש שׂ תּ ת, about forty entries built from the 22 Hebrew letters.

The letter names are Yiddish, not Modern Hebrew: beys not bet, giml, daled, khes, tes, yud, khof, ayen, tsadek, kuf, reysh and sof. As in Hebrew, five letters take a special shape at the end of a word: כ → ך (langer khof), מ → ם (shlos mem), נ → ן (langer nun), פֿ → ף (langer fey) and צ → ץ (langer tsadek), so ‘man’ is מאַן and ‘I’ is איך.

Three combinations of letters spell sounds of their own and are not counted as separate letters: זש for zh, טש for tsh as in מענטש (mentsh) and דזש for dzh as in דזשאַז (dzhaz, jazz).

Yiddish letters vs Hebrew: every vowel is written

The biggest difference between the Yiddish and Hebrew alphabets is the vowels. Hebrew writes mostly consonants and leaves vowels to the reader; Yiddish turned some Hebrew letters into full vowel letters and writes every vowel in its native words. אַ (pasekh alef) is a and אָ (komets alef) is o: מאַמע (mame, mum), דאָס (dos, this). ע (ayen) is e as in ער (er, he). ו (vov) is u as in גוט (gut, good), and י (yud) is i or y as in קינד (kind, child).

A shtumer alef, a silent א, is written before a word that begins with the vowel letters ו or י and before the double letters ױ and ײ: און (un, and), איך (ikh, I), איי (ey, egg). The marked forms only exist to avoid misreading: וּ (melupm vov) is u next to another vov, as in װוּ (vu, where), and יִ (khirek yud) is i next to another yud, as in ייִדיש (yidish), the YIVO spelling of the word Yiddish itself.

The double letters are Yiddish inventions: װ (tsvey vovn) is v as in װאַסער (vaser, water), ױ is oy as in אױף (oyf, on), ײ (tsvey yudn) is ey as in שײן (sheyn, beautiful) and ײַ is ay as in זײַ (zay, be). Unicode has a single character for each, U+05F0, U+05F1, U+05F2 and U+FB1F; many writers simply type two letters, וו, וי, יי, and both forms are read the same way.

Hebrew-origin words and the letters ח כּ שׂ ת תּ בֿ

Words that came into Yiddish from Hebrew and Aramaic keep their traditional Hebrew spelling, mostly without vowels: שבת is shabes, חכמה is khokhme (wisdom), מזל is mazl (luck). That is why some letters appear almost only in such words: ח (khes) and כּ (kof) for kh and k, שׂ (sin) and ת (sof) for s, תּ (tof) for t and בֿ (veys) for v, as in מזל־טובֿ (mazl-tov). In native words the same sounds are written כ, ק, ס, ט and װ.

There is more than one Yiddish spelling. The YIVO standard of 1936 is the one used in most textbooks, dictionaries and the Yiddish Forverts, and it uses all the points shown on this page. Hasidic newspapers and books, read by most Yiddish speakers today, follow an older custom with fewer points: often אידיש for Yiddish, plain פ for f, and ײ for ay without the pasekh. Soviet Yiddish went the other way and spelled Hebrew-origin words phonetically, שאַבעס for shabes, so a reader of old Soviet books meets fewer of the Hebrew-only letters.

How to type in Yiddish: keyboard, ligatures and pointed letters

On a computer, Yiddish is typed with a Hebrew keyboard: add Hebrew as an input language (Windows: Settings, Time & language, Language & region; Mac: System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources) and switch with Windows + Space or the input menu. The Mac also offers a Yiddish – QWERTY input source that puts letters on keys by sound. On phones, Gboard has a Yiddish keyboard; any Hebrew keyboard will also do, typing ligatures as two letters.

The points are combining marks typed after the letter: א then pasekh ַ (U+05B7) gives אַ, א then komets ָ (U+05B8) gives אָ, פ then rafe ֿ (U+05BF) gives פֿ, פ then dagesh ּ (U+05BC) gives פּ. The pointed letters in the grid are Unicode presentation forms such as אַ U+FB2E and אָ U+FB2F; Unicode normalization turns them back into letter plus mark, so a pasted אַ and a typed אַ match in search.

Yiddish punctuation is mostly European: commas, full stops, question and exclamation marks, and low-high quotation marks „…“ in many books, though plain "…" is common online. Abbreviations take a geresh ׳ or gershayim ״, as in ר׳ (reb, Mr) and ד״ר (doktor). Compounds with Hebrew words often use the high hyphen maqaf ־: שלום־עליכם (sholem-aleykhem).

Where Yiddish is spoken today

Before the Second World War some 11 million people spoke Yiddish, from the Netherlands to Russia and in emigrant cities from New York to Buenos Aires. Most of them were killed in the Holocaust or moved to other languages. Estimates of today's speakers range from about 600,000 to 900,000, a figure that is growing again because Yiddish is the everyday language of many Hasidic families, whose communities have high birth rates.

The biggest communities are in Israel (estimates of up to about 250,000 speakers, in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak and Beit Shemesh) and the United States (from about 160,000 on census-style counts to about 250,000 on some estimates, above all in Brooklyn and in Rockland and Orange counties of New York State), followed by the United Kingdom (tens of thousands, mainly in Stamford Hill, London) and Canada (over 10,000 native speakers, mostly in Montreal), with smaller ones in Antwerp and elsewhere. Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldova were the historic heartland. Sweden lists Yiddish as one of its five national minority languages. For the money signs, Israel uses the shekel ₪, the US and Canada the dollar $, the UK the pound £.

For the same letters as used by Hebrew, with nikud vowel points and Israel's shekel, see Hebrew Letters & Symbols; for the language most of Yiddish's vocabulary shares roots with, German Letters; for country emoji, the Israel, United States and Ukraine collections.