Yiddish has been dying a slow death for at least 50 years, but lovers of the Jewish language of Eastern European villages and East Coast immigrant slums still cling to the \o7 mame-loshn\f7 , their mother tongue, even in Southern California.

They go to literary lectures, informal discussion groups, classes and songfests. Orthodox Jews sometimes debate the Talmud in Yiddish. Old people on bus benches in Jewish neighborhoods gossip in the language of their youth. And a small but growing number of younger Jews who grew up speaking English are turning to Yiddish studies.

This much activity might have surprised the pioneers of the Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club, who drew up a 50-year charter when they staged their first evening of tea and cake in 1926. Even then, Yiddishists were worried that America would prove rocky ground for their transplanted tongue\o7 .\f7

Sixty-three years later, the club still stages a formal program every Saturday night from October through June at the Institute of Jewish Education on 3rd Street in the Fairfax District, but no one knows how long it will last.

In fact, no one really knows how many Yiddish speakers there are--either in Southern California, home to an estimated 700,000 Jews, or in the world at large.

"While the use of the language as a primary vernacular has been declining, interest in it, both sentimental and seriously intellectual, has been rising," says the Jewish Encyclopedia. "(T)he measurement of the present knowledge of Yiddish . . . requires tools far subtler than those of ordinary censuses."

But there is no doubt that the number has been shrinking. Joshua Fishman, a sociolinguist who teaches at Yeshiva and Stanford universities, said there may be 3.5 million Yiddish speakers in the world today, including about 1.25 million in the United States, compared to an estimated 12 million worldwide and just under 3 million in this country on the eve of World War II.

Yiddish (the name literally means Jewish) has its roots in the Dark Ages, when Jews who lived in southern France and northern Italy migrated into what is now Germany.

They spoke their own language, similar to the Romance languages of that day, but exchanged it for a form of medieval German, adding words from Hebrew and using the Hebrew alphabet.

Modern Yiddish emerged as they gradually moved to Eastern Europe. It is distinct from modern German, with words folded in from Hebrew and the Slavic and Romance languages like so many raisins in a New Year's \o7 koylitsh \f7 (egg bread).