I never intended to spend months listening to Holocaust testimonies.  My name is Chaya Nove, I am a sociolinguist working on a doctoral dissertation about language change in Yiddish vowels. In my research, I consider the Yiddish spoken by Hasidic Jews in New York today (Hasidic Yiddish, or HY) as a living, changing language, with the understanding that this language was once spoken by a group of people in another time and place. 

Chaya Nove is a PhD candidate in the Linguistics program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include sociolinguistics, phonetics, language variation and change, contact linguistics and bilingualism. She is currently working on a project to investigate variation and change in the vowel system of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish spoken in New York. She is also conducting acoustic analyses of European Yiddish using archival recordings. Visit her CUNY website profile here.