Yiddish, a language that is over 1,000 years old, is spoken in a
variety of its dialects and accents by the Ashkenazic Jewish community
in Europe. As a result of assimilation and the Holocaust, the number of
Yiddish-speakers, both native ones and those who learned the language,
substantially decreased in the 20th century, especially after World War
II.
In the mid-1980s, Yiddish revival emerged primarily on the American
musical and theater scene, gradually covering other parts of the world.
Currently Yiddish is widely spoken in the religious Jewish (Orthodox/Hassidic) communities throughout the world, as well as by a relatively
small amount of cultural activists that call themselves Yiddishists and
by an even smaller group of Jewish anarchists in Israel and the US.
