Yiddish
Yiddish is a Germanic language spoken by about four million Jews throughout the world. The language arose in central Europe between the 9th and 12th centuries as an amalgam of Middle and High German dialects, incorporating also many Hebrew words. Modern Yiddish also contains a great many words derived from Slavic languages.
One curious aspect of the language is that it often tends to use Latin words for religious rituals, apparently borrowing the terminology from the Catholic Church. As an example, to say grace after meals is, in Yiddish, to bench, which is apparently a corruption of the same term that gave English the word "benediction," while to daven, or pray, is descended from the same root as the English word "devotion."
Although Yiddish is generally written using an alphabet which is an adaptation of the Hebrew alphabet and although it has many Hebrew loan words, the language itself is not linguistically related to Hebrew.
The period of 1800-1900 is widely considered the Golden Age of Yiddish literature; this period also coincides with the revivial of Hebrew as a spoken language, and the revival of Hebrew literature. Largely because of the influence of Jewish entertainment figures, many Yiddish words have entered the American English lexicon. In 1968, Leo Rosten (d.1997) published his seminal <The Joys of Yiddish/>, an excellent and highly entertaining introduction to the type of Yiddish words used in the U.S.A. today, also by non-Jewish speakers ('Yinglish', 'Ameridish').
1859 - 1916 Saloman Rabinovic, better known as Shalom Aleichem. The Yiddish equivalent of Mark Twain, Shalom Aleichem is known as one of the greatest Yiddish authors.
The twentieth century saw a dramatic decline in the use of Yiddish. In Eastern Europe, Yiddish speakers were targets of the Holocaust. In the United States, Yiddish speakers tended not not pass on the language to their children who assimilated and spoke English. In Israel, Yiddish was displaced by Modern Hebrew.
In 1978 Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer received the Nobel Prize in literature.