Yiddish is mainly a Germanic language with a large vocabulary from Aramaic-Hebrew (loshn koydesh 'holy language'. There is also a sizeable input from various Slavic languages depending on dialect area (e.g., Poland, Galicia, or the Baltic states). There are also traces of Romance. In the Soviet Union, before they banned Yiddish outright, there was an official language policy of purging Yiddish of its Semitic, mainly religious, vocabulary. The original Yiddish speakers seem to have come from the Rhineland area of Germany, before moving on to the Pale in the East. The two major divisions of Yiddish, West (Benelux, France, Germany, mostly extinct by the late 19th century, modern Yiddish speakers in these countries are Eastern European speakers who migrated west after WW2) and East (Poland, Lithuanian, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine). The main bodies of speakers are divided between Israel and the USA/Canada. Argentina had a sizable Yiddish-speaking community, but that community has been dwindling.

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