Among European Jews Yiddish fought with Modern Hebrew as an artistic language. In the years prior to the Holocaust, there were presumably 10-11 million Yiddish speakers around the world. Because of the Holocaust, social absorption in America and in the USSR, and move to Hebrew in Israel, today there an expected 3 million speakers left, the greater part of whom never again use Yiddish as their essential language. It remains the ordinary language just in a couple of Orthodox and Hassidic people group.