Contact in a Diaspora Language: Hasidic Yiddish in New York

We define Hasidic Yiddish in New York as a 'diaspora language' spoken in trans-local, trans-national communities by descendants of migrants with no direct connection to a homeland or monolingual baseline. Drawing on a corpus of recordings of public speech, we test predictions of a model that regards borrowing as alteration of routines of managing a multilingual repertoire, conditioned by several pull factors. We identify borrowings from American English around idiomatic collocations, interaction management devices, expressions that process clashes of presuppositional expectations, ambiguity-fusion and pattern replication.