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Yiddish? Why don't we speak Judeo-French?

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I am an English speaker and therefore a reflection of Jewish language shift. I am told that as a child my first language was Yiddish. Perhaps it was, although as far back as I can remember, I always thought in English. Be that as it may, I don't speak Yiddish very well. My cousins don't speak it at all, although my parents and all my aunts and uncles were born in Poland. Those who were born before World War I were born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My maternal grandparents came to the United States in their fifties and never quite learned English.

I can speak Yiddish better than my cousins because my field is linguistics. I love languages. My Yiddish is quite regional, partly because I love dialects, but mostly because I spoke Yiddish only with relatives. When I was a child in Borough Park, Brooklyn, all the children spoke English only among themselves. One of my cousins lived with his paternal grandparents--not my grandparents--and spoke Yiddish to them, but ten years later, he couldn't speak the language at all.

There are many factors determining whether or not language shift takes place in a community, especially if the community is transplanted. A determining factor, I believe, is whether or not the language spoken by the local population and the official language of the country are the same. In a country where most people speak the official language of the country in their homes, Jews speak the official language or a Jewish variety of that language. Thus, Jews speak English---or Jewish English--in America, French in France, Hungarian in Hungary, etc. In the Russian Empire, on the other hand, where the official language was Russian, Jews were likely to live in towns where their neighbors spoke Ukrainian or Lithuanian or Polish or Moldavian or some other language that wasn't Russian. In such a situation, the Jews spoke Yiddish. In big cities like Kiev and Odessa where the local language was Russian, Jews switched from Yiddish to Russian.

After World War I, Russian spread into towns and villages where it had not been spoken...

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