A New Approach to Exploring the Archive of the
Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry

Robert Neumann, Association for the Promotion of Yiddish Language and Culture

The work presented here under methodological aspects is not primarily philology driven. Our work in toto is embedded in a much more general, culture-political framework. We think that there is a lack of knowledge in Europe about its most recent cultural history. In working in Europe with the archive of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry we want to contribute to closing this gap.

Let us summarize our guidelines in 3 sentences:

1. The very foundation of a professional language archive is a large and varied collection of data.
2. Knowledge gained through the study of such a collection is an archive's stock-in-trade.
3. The sharing of knowledge is the basis for all professional and public activities of a language archive.

What are the required components of such an enterprise? They are:

1. an extensive reference library of documented artefacts with all data potentially available for legimate study and research,
2. a secure permanent repository of the artefacts,
3. a center for artefact identification,
4. a clearinghouse for professional inquiries,
5. an educational resource,
6. a public gallery where people can simply look, wonder, consider, appreciate and reminisce.

In a more linguistic definition:

1. Our 'artefacts' are the speech, i.e. the real sound signals.
2. Our 'reference library' are the various annotation levels.
3. Our 'repository' is the database containing segmented speech.
4. Our 'center for artefact identification' are tools with which to manage the access to the database.
5. Our clearing house for professional inquiries is the accessibility of the data and tools as a publicly available laboratory. Each inquiry, together with its results, becomes a further means for structuring the data in an incremental enhancement of annotation layers.
6. The possibilities of the emerging database as an educational resource are certainly evident to you - we hope for your participation as transmitters.
7. The function of a 'public gallery' may be more connected to the culture-political goals of our enterprise. But trying to answer the question of CUI BONO serves the academic field as well.

What is the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry?

It is one of the biggest collections of spoken language in the world - about 6000 hours of tape recordings.

The archive was initiated and gathered by the eminent linguist and Yiddish scholar Uriel Weinreich. From the late fifties through the sixties he and his team interviewed emigrant informants, mostly in the US and in Israel. Most of the informants were survivors of the Holocaust and all of them were native to one of 600 selected cities and towns in Central Europe. The archive is an attempt at reconstructing the historical Yiddish language and culture area after it was dislocated and its home territory destroyed.

The archive provides a basis for Yiddish and interlingual studies and is a resource for anthropological cultural and historical research.

At the heart of the inquiry, and thus of each interview, was a questionnaire designed on structural principles to cover the main topics of the linguistic and ethnological variety in the former Yiddish home territory.