Dr. Emma Breslow

Hello! I am a Lecturer in Yiddish in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University. I am also the Heirloom Program Director for the Jewish Language Project.

I recently graduated with my PhD from the Linguistics Department of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. My research focuses on sociolinguistics, language revitalization and documentation, and phonetics. More specifically, my dissertation examines sociophonetic variation and language attitudes in the Yiddish spoken by people living in contexts where Yiddish is not the vernacular. I am also interested in lexical variation in Jewish English spoken in Australia and the US, the experiences of diasporic, minoritized, or endangered language communities, and the intersection of ethnobotany and linguistics in the study of Woleaian, a Chuukic language spoken in the Federated States of Micronesia.

My dissertation advisor was Dr. Andrew Cheng, and my committee members were Dr. Amy Schafer and Dr. Andrea Berez-Kroeker from UHM, and Dr. Isaac Bleaman from UC Berkeley.

Feel free to reach out to me at ebreslow [at] brandeis [dot] edu for questions about my Yiddish teaching, and ebreslow [at] hawaii [dot] edu if you have any questions about my research!