Why does Yiddish use the Hebrew alphabet if it's a separate language?

Answer 1

Though Yiddish, which uses Hebrew letters, looks similar when written down to a non-speaker of Yiddish or Hebrew, it is in fact an entirely different language.

Hebrew arose in the Middle East and falls into the Afro-Asiatic Semitic family of languages whereas Yiddish is an Indo-European Germanic language that arose in Germany and Eastern Europe - it is similar to Hochdeutsch, High German, which would have been the everyday language of Jews living in those areas (Hebrew would have been used during worship and rarely by women who were not required to learn it due to the outdated Jewish concept that females are "closer to G-d" and more holy than males), but uses the Hebrew letters with which they were familiar.

As it was spoken by Jews in many different nations, from Russia to Western Europe, is is sometimes called the first international language (others being Esperanto and Volupuk).

Yiddish essentially combined Hebrew alphabet and some words with German words and terms and was used by many of the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe.

Why does English use the Latin alphabet if it's a different language?

Answer 2

Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet because it developed within Jewish communities that primarily used Hebrew script for religious texts. The adoption of the Hebrew alphabet allowed Yiddish speakers to write in a familiar script while using a different language. This helped preserve the Jewish cultural and religious identity within the Yiddish-speaking community.

Answer 3

Consider this: English uses the Latin alphabet even though English is a separate language from Latin.

Yiddish likely uses the Hebrew alphabet, because until the 18th and 19th Centuries, Jews did not attend public schools in Europe, so they didn't learn to read German or any other national writing system. They had to adapt their dialect of German to the Hebrew alphabet, which they were very familiar with.