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From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium

Yiddish is a West Germanic language commonly spoken by people of Jewish heritage originating from Central and Eastern Europe and now settled in several parts of the World. Though usually written in the Hebrew alphabet, from a language typological standpoint it is a dialect of German, with lexical admixtures from Hebrew language and, at least in some dialects, phonological innovations adopted from Slavic, esp. Polish. The name "Jiddish" derives from the southwestern German dialectal pronunciation of Standard German Jüdisch, meaning "Jewish."