וועלען בענטשען or וועלין בענטשין

Question

I'm fairly competent in speaking Yiddish, in fact, most of friends, family, and teachers consider me a fluent speaker. However, I noticed an interesting difference between two siddurim of mine.

In my Artscroll siddur, Zimun in Birkas Hamazon begins as follows:

[רבותי מיר וועלען בענטשען [רבותי נברך

But in my Siddur Tehillas Hashem by Kehos, Zimun looks like this:

רבותי מיר וועלין בענטשין

What's the reason for the difference in spelling? Why does the Siddur Tehillas Hashem say מיר וועלין בענטשין when the Artscroll says מיר וועלען בענטשען? From my experience with Yiddish, Artscroll appears to be right in this case because I learned Yiddish that way. Is it a difference between ליטוויש and חסידישע Yiddish?

Answer 1

The various spellings are trying to get at a vowel-less pronunciation of the final syllable: the syllabic n (for example, some English dialects pronounce "button" as "but'n", with a syllabic n at the end). From Uriel Weinreich's dictionary, in the section on non-YIVO-standard orthography:

a superfluous ע is sometimes written before final ל or ן to mark their syllabicity.

The same occurs (although less common) with a י instead of an ע (perhaps modeled on the feminine suffix ־ין, where the י is written but not pronounced). YIVO standardized spelling writes your words as װעלן ("veln") and בענטשן ("bentshn"), without any vowel before the ן. See here for more details.