出版社：Estonian Literary Museum and Estonian Folklore Institute
摘要：Let us imagine a monolingual person, a member of a linguistic majority. If we wish to describe his/her sociolinguistic history, there would hardly be any complications. We can ask what his/her mother tongue is and receive a clear answer. However, in the case of a multilingual the situation is much more complicated. We will argue below that the question concerning a multilingual’s mother tongue cannot be answered in a clear-cut manner. First, multiple definitions of mother tongue are possible and various criteria can be used as a basis. Second, one’s identification can alter over a period of time and at different points a person can have different mother tongues. A sociolinguistic study of a Jewish community always involves a study of multilingualism (Fishman 1991a: 308). There is more to it than that: Yiddish still remains an internally conflicted language and people sharing an ethnocultural identity would often disagree on matters concerning Yiddish (Kerler 1998). Fishman (1991a: 41– 52) has analyzed an example of such a disagreement in his paper on M. Lefin-Satanover, T. Feder and Y. Sh. Bik.
