Soviet Yiddish

This is the first comprehensive study of Yiddish in the former Soviet Union. A chronicle of orthographic and other reforms from the state of the language in pre-Revolutionary Russia, through active language-planning in the 1920s and 1930s, repression, and subsequent developments up to the 1980s is recreated from contemporary publications and archival materials. Soviet Yiddish language-planning is compared with concurrent reforms in Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and German; and the features and types of Soviet Yiddish word-formation are analysed.