The beginning of studies in bilingualism is marked by Uriel Weinreich's book Languages in Contact. It is certainly no coincidence that Weinreich was also a well-known scholar in the field of Yiddish linguistics. The Yiddish language emerged out of a situation of multilingualism - this much is evident, although there is currently a scholarly debate about different scenarios of the language's development. The lecture aims at outlining facts and hypotheses regarding the emergence of the Yiddish language, and will emphasise the importance of oral tradition as a determining factor in the development of the Yiddish language.

Gertrud Reershemius obtained her Ph.D. on the subject of biographical narrations in Yiddish (Hamburg 1993). Her main areas of research are Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics, Language Contact and West-Germanic minority languages (Yiddish and Low German). Between 1994 and 1996 she has been a Teaching Fellow at St Andrews University (Scotland). Since 1996 she is Senior Lecturer in German Linguistics at Aston University in Birmingham.