Miland:Yiddish with 3 million has 199!

Very interesting numbers, thanks very much.

Yiddish, however, is a poor example. If you look at the dates of the Yiddish films, most of them are pre-war. The ones that are not pre-war are mostly films in English (or another language) with a small amount of Yiddish dialogue mixed in. Prior to the war, there were 11-13 million Yiddish speakers. There was a thriving Yiddish arts scene, with a lot of films and theatrical productions (as you might expect, for a population of speakers of that size). The destruction of the European Yiddish-speaking communities due to the Holocaust, and assimilation of Yiddish speakers in the diaspora, led to a plunge in the number of speakers. Therefore, the number of Yiddish films is not really representative of the number of Yiddish speakers (plus the fact that you must remove from the list all of those movies that are in English, French, Spanish, etc and have one or two Yiddish sentences included. Blazing Saddles is hardly a "Yiddish film")

erinja:

Miland:Yiddish with 3 million has 199!

Very interesting numbers, thanks very much.

Yiddish, however, is a poor example. If you look at the dates of the Yiddish films, most of them are pre-war. The ones that are not pre-war are mostly films in English (or another language) with a small amount of Yiddish dialogue mixed in. Prior to the war, there were 11-13 million Yiddish speakers. There was a thriving Yiddish arts scene, with a lot of films and theatrical productions (as you might expect, for a population of speakers of that size). The destruction of the European Yiddish-speaking communities due to the Holocaust, and assimilation of Yiddish speakers in the diaspora, led to a plunge in the number of speakers. Therefore, the number of Yiddish films is not really representative of the number of Yiddish speakers (plus the fact that you must remove from the list all of those movies that are in English, French, Spanish, etc and have one or two Yiddish sentences included. Blazing Saddles is hardly a "Yiddish film")

Looking at the first 50 films on the IMDB list of around 200, 32 are post-war, which suggests that the majority of films using Yiddish in some way are not pre-war. Of the post-war films on the list, 4 have Yiddish listed as their first language, but a very large number use Yiddish, so that Blazing Saddles probably has the odd Yiddish phrase, just as Gattaca has a public announcement in Esperanto. If this sample is representative, we might expect between 10 and 20 films using Yiddish as their first language. This sort of figure would be consistent with the general pattern on which the number of Esperanto speakers could be estimated. Roughly, the number of films having a minority language as the first language without government help appears to be one for every quarter million speakers, assuming the existence of a 'critical mass' of speakers sufficinent to support a film industry. There have been three films using Esperanto as a first language, with a fourth on the way, so we might expect there to be up to a million speakers in thw world, but concentrated outside the First World, particularly in Eastern Europe. It would be very interesting to know the state of Esperanto in Poland or the Baltic states - how many speakers there are in Warsaw, for example.

I have counted 38 pre- and during-war Yiddish films available at the (US) National Center for Jewish Film.

There were certainly more that were either lost or haven't been restored and transferred to VHS/DVD, etc. We can reasonably assume that some Yiddish films were made and were lost in the purge of Jewish culture that happened during the war. I think it is fair to say that there are more - perhaps significantly more - than the specific ones I found.