For almost a thousand years, Yiddish was the mother tongue of the Ashkenazi Jews and, as such, was extremely widespread. Migrations of Jews to Eastern Europe and to the USA, encounters with other languages and cultures, and intra-Jewish developments led to the emergence of various Yiddish cultures. But despite this diversity, and although the language was once denigrated as a corrupted variant of German, Yiddish developed into a modern global language which has given us great writers like Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yiddish is still a living language which means a lot to its speakers and those who love it – not least as a reminder of the Eastern European Jews killed during the Second World War.