[null_deref]

I partially disagree with you, yes Ladino and Judeo-Arabic are dying, but that's not true for Yiddish. Many Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and outside of it, are using it for their day to day activities, and reserve Hebrew for religious purposes only.

[Mediterraneo10]

The Yiddish used today by the Haredim is fundamentally different from the Yiddish used before World War II. Yiddish used to be the language of a vibrant secular arts and culture scene: some fantastic literature, theatre plays and films, along with journalism on all kinds of issues and political debate from all sides of the spectrum. However, in Europe that world largely perished in the Holocaust or through emigration to Israel, and through assimilation in North America. So yes, today the Haredim continue to use Yiddish, but for a far more limited range of topics, because they are an austere religious movement that has intentionally limited the range of topics in their lives.

(As an apt parallel, albeit perhaps obscure to many here, saying Yiddish is not dead because the Haredim use it is like saying that Sogdian is not dead because it survives as Yaghnobi. But the Yaghnobi language used by some impoverished people in an isolated valley is a pale shadow of the cosmopolitan Sogdian language that was used before.)

[bluGill]

The same applies to German, what is spoken today isn't much like the German spoken 150 years ago. English of today is close enough to English back to around 1500, but go back to 1400 and it starts to become a different language.

Talk to a linguist if you want the very messy and complex details I just summarized to the point of butchering the truth.

[veddox]

> The same applies to German, what is spoken today isn't much like the German spoken 150 years ago.

How do you mean that? Of course there were different styles of speaking (especially in polite speech), but it‘s perfectly intelligible either way. In fact, even Martin Luther‘s German still sounds colloquial today (although the spelling was vastly different).

> English of today is close enough to English back to around 1500

That‘s a hundred years before Shakespeare. Who is decently understandable with some practice, but not what I would call „close“ to modern English.

[cambalache]

> The same applies to German, what is spoken today isn't much like the German spoken 150 years ago.

This is an amazing piece of information, even more incredible it is the fact the modern speakers can read Nietzsche with no problem at all, what a fantastic coincidence.

I mean, what native German speaker could even begin to understand this Schiller poem, it is 200! years old!! It could be very well be written in proto-Germanic:

An den Frühling

Willkommen, schöner Jüngling!

Du Wonne der Natur!

Mit deinem Blumenkörbchen

Willkommen auf der Flur!

Denkst auch noch an mein Mädchen?

Ei, Lieber, denke doch!

Dort liebte mich das Mädchen

Und’s Mädchen liebt mich noch!

Willkommen, schöner Jüngling!

Du Wonne der Natur!

Mit deinem Blumenkörbchen

Willkommen auf der Flur!

[bluGill]

Written German of them past has little in common with the spoken language.

In practice natives had trouble understanding each other if they traveled just a few villages over

[veddox]

Irony doesn‘t come over very well online...

[cambalache]

Thanks god this is sarcasm

[hackissimo123]

To add to this, "endangered" languages aren't necessarily those with few speakers, and languages with few speakers aren't necessarily endangered. What matters is how many children are being raised to speak the language; some languages are rare but are in no danger of dying out (at least not within the next generation) while others are more common but the speakers are disproportionately old and few children are learning it.

I don't know much about Yiddish but I believe it's in the former category. Yiddish was by far the most common language among Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust; there are still fewer than 10% as many Yiddish speakers in the world today as there were in 1930. But according to Wikipedia "the number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities."

[amitport]

Yiddish really isn't going anywhere and there are still plenty of children raised to speak it. So it is (perhaps surprisingly) in the latter category (only among (ultra?)orthodox Jews, but they're not endangered).