Yiddish is the historic language of Ashkenazi Jews, a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet that blends a German base with substantial Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic elements. Before the Second World War it had an estimated ten million speakers or more across Central and Eastern Europe; the Holocaust and later assimilation reduced that number drastically. Today Yiddish survives most strongly in Haredi communities, where it remains an everyday first language and speaker numbers are growing; London's Stamford Hill is home to one of Europe's largest Yiddish-speaking communities. The main dialect division is between Western Yiddish, now essentially extinct, and the Eastern dialects of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. The writer Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for his Yiddish fiction in 1978.
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