Judaeo-Spanish (alternatively spelled Judeo-Spanish; autonym , Hebrew script: ), also known as Ladino, Judezmo, or Spaniolit, is a Romance language derived from Castilian Old Spanish.
It has been spoken by Sephardic Jews since they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula after the Edict of Expulsion, and with their migrations it spread throughout the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, West Asia, and North Africa) as well as France, Italy, the Netherlands, Morocco, and England. It is today spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most speakers residing currently in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, and France.
The core vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is Old Spanish, and it has numerous elements from the other old Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Aragonese language, Old Catalan, Asturleonese, Galician-Portuguese, and Andalusi Romance. The language has been further influenced by Ottoman Turkish and Semitic vocabulary, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic—especially in the domains of religion, law, and spirituality—and most of the vocabulary for new and modern concepts has been adopted through French and Italian. Furthermore, the language is influenced to a lesser degree by other local languages of the Balkans, such as Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian.
Historically, the Rashi script and its cursive form Solitreo have been the main orthographies for writing Ladino. However, today it is mainly written with the Latin alphabet, though some other alphabets such as Hebrew and Cyrillic are still in use. Judaeo-Spanish has been known also by other names, such as: (), () or (), (), () or (in North Africa). In Turkey, and formerly in the Ottoman Empire, it has been traditionally called in Turkish, meaning the 'Jewish language.' In Israel, Hebrew speakers usually call the language , or .
Ladino, once the Jewish lingua franca of the Adriatic Sea, the Balkans, and the Middle East, and renowned for its rich literature, especially in Salonika, today is under serious threat of extinction. Most native speakers are elderly, and the language is not transmitted to their children or grandchildren for various reasons; consequently, all Judeo-Spanish-speaking communities are undergoing a language shift. In 2018, four native speakers in Bosnia were identified; however, two of them have since died, David Kamhi in 2021 and Moris Albahari in late 2022. In some expatriate communities in Spain, Latin America, and elsewhere, there is a threat of assimilation by modern Spanish. It is experiencing, however, a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music.
In 2017 the Royal Spanish Academy announced plans to boost the conservation of the Ladino language by opening a Judeo-Spanish branch in Israel to its existing Association of Academies of the Spanish Language.
Darío Villanueva described Judeo-Spanish as “an extraordinarily important cultural and historical phenomenon” that was overdue an academy of its own.
Name
The Jewish scholar Joseph Nehama, author of the comprehensive Dictionnaire du judéo-espagnol, referred to the language as . The 1903 Hebrew–Judeo-Spanish Haggadah entitled "" (), from the Sephardic community of Livorno, Italy, refers to the language used for explanation as the Sefaradi language. The rare Judeo-Spanish-language textbook entitled , published in Salonica in 1929, referred to the language as and .
The language is also called Judeo-Espanyol, Judeoespañol,Entry "judeoespañol, la", in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE). Retrieved on 1 June 2019. Sefardí, Judío, and Espanyol or Español sefardita; Haketia (from 'tell') refers to the dialect of North Africa, especially Morocco. Judeo-Spanish has also been referred to as Judesmo (also Judezmo, Djudesmo or Djudezmo). The dialect of the Oran area of Algeria was called Tétuani after the Moroccan city of Tétouan since many Orani Jews came from there. In Israel, the language is known as Spanyolit or Espanyolit. The names Djidio, Kasteyano Muestro, and Spanyol de mozotros have also been proposed to refer to the language; regional names to refer to the language include kastiyano viejo, sepharadit, ekseris romeka, yahudije, and musevije.
An entry in Ethnologue claims, "The name 'Judesmo' is used by Jewish linguists and Turkish Jews and American Jews; 'Judeo-Spanish' by Romance philologists; 'Ladino' by laymen, initially in Israel; 'Haketia' by Moroccan Jews; 'Spanyol' by some others." That does not reflect the historical usage. In the Judaeo-Spanish press of the 19th and 20th centuries the native authors referred to the language almost exclusively as , which was also the name that its native speakers spontaneously gave to it for as long as it was their primary spoken language. More rarely, the bookish Judeo-Espanyol has also been used since the late 19th century.
Most speakers of Judeo-Spanish from westernized Turkish or Israeli society prefer the name Ladino, probably because it was less denotative of Jewish identity than the others. In recent decades in Israel, followed by the United States and Spain, the language has come to be referred to as Ladino (), literally meaning 'Latin'. This name for the language was promoted by the . However, speakers of the language in Israel referred to their mother tongue as or . Native speakers of the language consider the name Ladino to be incorrect, having for centuries reserved the term for the "semi-sacred" language used in word-by-word translations from the Bible, which is distinct from the spoken vernacular.Haim-Vidal Sephiha: Judeo-Spanish , on the former website of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki (Salonika). . Retrieved on 19 October 2011. According to linguist Paul Wexler, Ladino is a written language that developed in the eighteenth century and is distinct from spoken Judeo-Spanish. According to the website of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, the cultural center of Sephardic Judaism after the expulsion from Spain,
The derivation of the name Ladino is complicated. Before the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the word meant "literary Spanish" as opposed to other dialects, or "Romance" distinct from Arabic. Entry "ladino, na", in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE). Retrieved on 1 June 2019. One derivation has Ladino as derived from the verb enladinar, meaning "to translate", from when Jews, Christians and Arabs translated works from Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic into Spanish during the times of Alfonso X of Castile. (The first European-language grammar and dictionary of Spanish referred to it as or . In the Middle Ages, the word Latin was frequently used to mean simply 'language', particularly one understood: a latiner or latimer meant a translator.) Following the Expulsion, Jews spoke of "the Ladino" to mean the word-for-word translation of the Bible into Old Spanish. By extension, Ladino has generally been used to refer to that style of Spanish in the same way that (among Kurdish Jews) Targum has been used to refer to Judeo-Aramaic languages and Arab Jews, and sharḥ has come to mean Judeo-Arabic.
Judaeo-Spanish Ladino should not be confused with the Ladin language (), spoken in part of Northeast Italy. Ladin has nothing to do with Jews or with Spanish beyond being a Romance language, a property that it shares with French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.
Origins At the time of the expulsion from Spain, the day-to-day language of the Jews of different regions of the peninsula was hardly, if at all, different from that of their Christian neighbours. There may have been some dialect mixing to form a sort of Jewish lingua franca. There was, however, a special style of Spanish used for purposes of study or translation, featuring a more archaic dialect, a large number of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords and a tendency to render Hebrew word order literally ( "this night" was rendered instead of the normal Spanish "Clearing up Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, Sephardic Music" Judith Cohen, HaLapid, winter 2001; , Judith Cohen, Midstream July/August 2003). As mentioned above, authorities confine the term Ladino to that style.
Following the Expulsion of Jews from Spain, the process of dialect mixing continued, but Castilian Spanish remained by far the largest contributor. The daily language was increasingly influenced by both the language of study and the local non-Jewish vernaculars, such as Greek and Turkish. It came to be known as Judesmo and, in that respect, the development is parallel to that of Yiddish. However, many speakers, especially among community leaders, also had command of a more formal style, "castellano", which was closer to the Spanish at the time of the Expulsion.
Source languages Spanish The grammar, the phonology, and about 60% of the vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is essentially Spanish but, in some respects, it resembles the dialects in southern Spain and South America, rather than the dialects of Central Spain. For example, it has yeísmo ("she" is / (Judaeo-Spanish), instead of ) as well as seseo.
In many respects, it reproduces the Spanish of the time of the Expulsion, rather than the modern variety, as it retains some archaic features such as the following: Modern Spanish j, pronounced , corresponds to two different phonemes in Old Spanish: x, pronounced , and j, pronounced . Judaeo-Spanish retains the original sounds. Similarly, g before e or i remains or , not . Contrast ('low' or 'down,' with , modern Spanish ) and ('woman' or 'wife,' spelled the same, with ). Modern Spanish z (c before e or i), pronounced [s] or , like the th in English think, corresponds to two different phonemes in Old Spanish: ç (c before e or i), pronounced ; and z (in all positions), pronounced . In Judaeo-Spanish, they are pronounced and , respectively. Contrast ('heart,' with , modern Spanish ) and ('to say,' with , modern Spanish ). In modern Spanish, the use of the letters b and v is determined partly based on earlier forms of the language and partly based on Latin etymology. Both letters represent one phoneme, (), realised as or as according to its position. In Judaeo-Spanish, and are different phonemes: 'voice' vs. 'you'. v is a labiodental "v," like in English, rather than a bilabial.
Portuguese and other Iberian languages In some respects, the phonology of both the consonants and part of the lexicon is closer to Portuguese and Catalan than to modern Spanish. This is partially explained by direct influence, but also because Portuguese, Old Spanish and Catalan retained some of the characteristics of medieval Ibero-Romance languages that Spanish later lost. There was mutual influence with the Judaeo-Portuguese of the Portuguese Jews.
Contrast Judaeo-Spanish ('still') with Portuguese (Galician or , Asturian or ) and Spanish or the initial consonants in Judaeo-Spanish , ('daughter,' 'speech'), Portuguese , Galician or , , Asturian , , Aragonese , , Catalan ), Spanish , . It sometimes varied with dialect, as in Judaeo-Spanish popular songs, both and ('son') are found.
The Judaeo-Spanish pronunciation of s as "" before a "k" sound or at the end of certain words (such as , pronounced , for 'six') is shared with Portuguese (as spoken in Portugal, most of Lusophone Asia and Africa, and in a plurality of Brazilian varieties and registers with either partial or total forms of coda |S| palatalization) but not with Spanish.
Hebrew and Aramaic Like other Jewish vernaculars, Judaeo-Spanish incorporates many Hebrew and Aramaic words, mostly for religious concepts and institutions. Examples are ('rabbi', from Hebrew ) and ('synagogue', from Hebrew ). Some Judeo-Spanish words of Hebrew or Aramaic origin have more poetic connotations than their Spanish equivalents. Compare ('pride, arrogance') from Hebrew with ('arrogance') from Spanish .
Turkish