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What is a Jewish language? This is a simple question with a complicated answer. A language doesn't become Jewish just because some Jews speak it. Otherwise English would be the most widespread Jewish language today. Throughout most of their dispersion, Jews have been multilingual. It was not merely that they spoke their Jewish language among themselves and another language to their non-Jewish neighbors. Rather, the Jews were internally bilingual. In most places they communicated in two different "Jewish" languages. One of these languages, Hebrew, was the language of prayer, holy texts, and scholarship; the other was the Jewish vernacular used in daily life. Using the categorization of the first chapter, Hebrew represents the great tradition and the vernacular the little tradition. Hebrew was what Jews in most, but not all, cultures had in common, while the vernaculars differed from country to country and were not mutually intelligible.

What made a Jewish vernacular Jewish? In most cases, the vernacular languages of traditional Jewish communities had several characteristics in common. First, they were languages that Jews had learned by contact with non-Jewish neighbors at some point in their migrations. They were thus not of Jewish origin, although they often had Jewish characteristics (like the Hebrew alphabet) and performed Jewish functions (such as describing details of Jewish ritual). Second, they were generally learned not in formal schooling but by listening to native speakers. Since the languages were learned orally and based on colloquial usage, Jews generally wrote them down in their own Hebrew alphabet. The main exception to this is ancient Greek, which Jews did write in the Greek alphabet. Third, Jewish languages generally had a larger or smaller admixture of words of Hebrew origin (more precisely, of Hebrew and Aramaic origin). Fourth, Jewish languages often had elements of languages spoken at an earlier stage in Jewish migrations. Finally, Jewish languages were often different in nuance, pronunciation, intonation, and grammar from the speech of the non-Jewish population among whom Jews lived.

Usually the Jewish languages began by resembling those of the Jews' neighbors. Sometimes, however, as the result of migrations, Jews and non-Jews spoke totally different languages, and the speech of the Jews resembled that of nonJews in another part of the world.