Linguistics 597: SAMPLE “BLURB” ON AN ENDANGERED LANGUAGE B. Joseph

Name: LADINO/JUDEZMO/JUDEO-SPANISH/HAKETIA/SPANYOL/SEFARDI. The different names are used in different countries where it is spoken (e.g. “Haketia” in Morocco) or by different “constituencies” with an interest in the language (e.g. Romance linguists tend to use “Judeo-Spanish”).

Identifying information: As the alternative name “Judeo-Spanish” suggests, Ladino is the variety of Spanish spoken in parts of Southeastern Europe (the Balkans). It originated as a dialect of Spanish spoken by Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) Jews who were forced to leave Spain and Portugal in the 15th century during the Spanish Inquisition (thus in some sense it’s an “ethnolect” – an ethnically based dialect – or what has sometimes been called a “Jewish interlanguage” (Wexler 1981), of which Yiddish is the most “famous” example). Sephardic Jews relocated all over the Mediterranean and elsewhere. Ladino is the variety of Spanish that these immigrant Jews brought with them. It is thus a member of the Ibero-Romance dialect branch of the Romance languages (offshoots of Latin).

Where: Ladino is (or has been) spoken historically by Sephardic Jews, from Morocco to Turkey, with many now re-(re-)settled in Israel. This territory includes various parts of the Balkans (in what is now the Republic of Macedonia, Romania, and Turkey, as well as Greece). I focus here on Ladino in Greece as it shows a way in which languages can be threatened that has not come out in class discussion so far: cataclysmic and catastrophic events can lead to a language's demise.

Ethnologue information / Population: Ladino is not given as a “language of Greece” though it is mentioned as a “language of Israel” and mention is made of some members of the ethnic group in Greece. As of 1985, there were some 100,000 or more speakers in Israel; in 1992, the total population for all countries was estimated at 160,000.

In Greece, there were Sephardic Jewish settlements in the Ionian islands of the west (e.g. Corfu) and nearby cities (especially Ioaninna), across the north but especially in Thessaloniki (the second largest city of Greece), and elsewhere (including the island of Rhodes in the southeastern part of the Aegean). The numbers once were very large and the communities quite strong: Thessaloniki went from being a robustly Jewish city (so much so that the city would basically shut down on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath) with c. 60,000 Jewish inhabitants in the early 20th century to having far less than 2000 now, and Rhodes went from having a vibrant community with some 2000 members to having only about 10 now. Most of the Jewish Greeks of Thessaloniki and Rhodes were killed or shipped off to concentration camps by the Germans in the occupation during World War II (though some miraculously escaped). The language in Greece thus went in a very short period of a few years from being lively and robust to being moribund, largely as a result of an externally imposed catastrophe (the Holocaust).

Comments: Depending on its coterritorial language, Ladino shows influence from different languages: Arabic and French in northern Africa, Turkish in Turkey, Greek in Greece. According to Ethnologue, all speakers of Ladino are bilingual in the local coterritorial language; no monolingual speakers remain.

While the language remains moribund in Greece, with few who use it at all, there are speakers in Israel and poickets remain (e.g. in Istanbul). In Greece there are movements under way to recapture the cultural heritage associated with Ladino; Nar 1985 for instance describes the former synagogues of Thessaloniki (now all destroyed) and contains a collection of traditional songs. There are good descriptions of other Balkan varieties of the language (e.g. Sala 1971 on Bucharest Juedo-Spanish, and note also Sala 1976 for an overview of the language in all its forms). The prospects for survival as a living and functioning language are not good, though the existing grammatical descriptions and collections of texts and such mean that some record of the language will remain.

References:

Nar, Alberto. 1985. I sinagoges tis Theassalonikis. Ta tragoudia mas [The Synagogues of Thessaloniki. Our Songs]. Thessaloniki: Jewish Community of Thessaloniki. Sala, Marius, 1971 Phonétique et phonologie du judéo-espagnol de Bucarest, The Hague-Paris: Mouton. Sala, Marius. 1976. Le judéo-espagnol, The Hague: Mouton. Wexler, Paul. 1981. Jewish Interlinguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework. Language 57.99-149.