70 Heritage Language Journal, 17(1) https://doi.org/10.46538/hlj.17.1.3 April, 2020 Language Socialization and Intergenerational Transmission of Ladino: Three Generations of Speakers in the Twenty-First Century Bryan Kirschen Binghamton University ABSTRACT This study examines language socialization among five women of a single family who all speak Ladino, an endangered language spoken by Sephardic Jews. These women, ranging from 32-88 years of age, represent three generations raised in different countries and exposed to a number of languages, including Turkish, Hebrew, Ladino, Spanish, and English. Given the rarity of intergenerational transmission of Ladino over the past century, this study asks the following research questions: 1) how the women in this study have been able to preserve their heritage language, Ladino, in spite of contact with other languages, and 2) how said contact with other languages has affected their production of Ladino. To address these questions, each informant participated in a sociolinguistic interview and a lexical elicitation task. An analysis of data reveals the unique circumstances that have allowed for the grandmother’s relative monolingualism in Ladino, and the different trajectories the language has taken among subsequent generations. Despite relative stability vis-à-vis proficiency in Ladino, data indicate points of contact between Spanish and Ladino among the youngest informants who acquired both varieties simultaneously during childhood. This research was conducted in 2018 among informants in both (Florida) United States and (Bat Yam) Israel. KEYWORDS: Language Socialization; Intergenerational Transmission; Lexical Elicitation; Contact; Ladino; Spanish 1. INTRODUCTION This study explores language socialization and practice among three generations of Jewish women, each born in a different country at a different period throughout the twentieth century. This triad (grandmother-daughter-granddaughter) is not only united by blood but also by language: Ladino.1 Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish, is both a Romance language and a Jewish language; it is also an endangered language. By carrying out an apparent time study, this article seeks to understand the ways in which language socialization has allowed for intergenerational transmission of Ladino, while also providing for linguistic variation from one generation to the next. The article will begin with a review of the language and population in question, followed by a general overview of language socialization. After describing the participants, research questions, and methodologies, the study will examine the distribution of languages among informants as well as production in Ladino. The subsequent discussion will consider how language socialization has affected the ways in which informants in this study, particularly those of the youngest generation, negotiate and produce the multiple linguistic codes that they speak. 2. LANGUAGE AND POPULATION IN QUESTION: LADINO AND THE SEPHARDIM Ladino refers to the Castilian-based variety of Spanish that developed among the Jews who settled predominantly into the Ottoman Empire following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century. In a matter of a few generations, linguistic koinés formed among the Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 01:57:44PM via free access 71 Heritage Language Journal, 17(1) https://doi.org/10.46538/hlj.17.1.3 April, 2020 communities where Iberian Jews, known as Sephardim, resided. The two principal communities where koinés formed among Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire were in the cities of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, Turkey) and Salonica (today’s Thessaloniki, Greece) (Quintana Rodríguez, 2006, p. 276). The Spanish of the Sephardim continued to develop in a way unparalleled to that of the Spanish of Spain and the Americas. In contrast to those varieties, Ladino incorporated elements from Hebrew as well as contiguous languages to the Sephardim’s surroundings (e.g. Turkish, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, etc.). Ladino thrived for centuries in the regions where it was spoken among the Sephardim. One reason for the vitality of Ladino was due to the millet system in place in the Ottoman Empire. Under this system, religious minority groups had autonomous governance. Such self-governance allowed the Sephardim to remain in their own milieu, despite contact with other religious, linguistic, and cultural groups (Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000). As such, Sephardim were able to maintain their ways of life, including intergenerational transmission of Ladino. Today, Ladino is an endangered language. The shift in status began over a century ago with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. With the rise of nation states, Sephardim began to assimilate and acculturate to the linguistic ideologies and practices of their surroundings. This trend would continue for Sephardim who made their way to North and South America in the early part of the twentieth century and for the waves of Sephardim that migrated to Israel in the years following World War II.2 Aside from general forces of assimilation, the Holocaust is also a main reason for the endangerment of Ladino. During the first half of the 1940s, cities throughout what is now Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, to name a few, witnessed the mass decimation of their centuries-old Sephardic communities (Rodrigue, 2005). Today, most speakers of the language are septuagenarians or older; however, as this article will demonstrate, younger speakers exist. Given bilingual/multilingual proficiency in a number of languages and the limited domains to which Ladino often pertains, speakers of Ladino are considered heritage speakers of the language. The women in this study have maintained Ladino in their family for generations outside of the Iberian Peninsula, from Turkey to Israel to the United States. 3. LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION Given the endangered status of Ladino, the hybrid nature of Ladino as a Judeo-Spanish language, and the rarity of its intergenerational transmission, language socialization serves as an opportune framework to understand the multiplicity of layers that must be considered in accounting for the language’s preservation among the informants in this study. Language socialization refers to the diverse ways humans acquire social and linguistic competencies and activate them within a given social setting or group (Schieffelin & Oaks, 1986, p.163). As a field of research, language socialization has served as a focus of exploration in Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Education, and Sociology, thus demonstrating its interdisciplinarity (Duff 2017, p. x). While language socialization occurs alongside language acquisition throughout infancy and childhood, it is a process that continues throughout one’s lifespan. Apart from documenting practices of socialization in and about language, as a theoretical and methodological construct, language socialization also considers the linguistic properties of a language and variation among speakers. What is more, language socialization can serve as a framework to analyze multilingual sites, where various codes are present (Pahl, 2017). Attention Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 01:57:44PM via free access 72 Heritage Language Journal, 17(1) https://doi.org/10.46538/hlj.17.1.3 April, 2020 to multilingualism is pertinent to this study, as Ladino competes with a number of different languages. In particular, Ladino serves as a heritage language for nearly all speakers today, thus presenting an additional dimension to the ways in which one can examine language socialization through practice and ideology. An examination of language socialization and the indexicality of a particular code, as Ochs and Schiefflin (2017, p. 10) and Howard (2017, p. 170) suggest, will elucidate the reasons for which a community experiences language shift or maintenance. Studies that have examined language socialization in the United States among Latino populations (Potowski, 2011; Villarreal, 2014; Zentella, 1997) as well as Jewish populations (Avineri, 2012; Benor 2012; Fader, 2009) will also demonstrate the panoply of ways that children and adults become socialized in and through language in their respective communities; these studies are particularly beneficial to this article as we examine the intertwined nature of a language that has been explored as both a Jewish language and a variety of Spanish. While language socialization has been explored across communities that utilize Jewish languages or varieties of Spanish, this study aims to explore the intersection of these ethnolinguistic groups through Ladino. Avineri and Avni (2017, p.2) report that, within Jewish communities, familiarity with more than one language has always been the norm. That is, bi/multilingualism is a common characteristic across Jewish communities around the globe. Research on language socialization in and through a Jewish language has been explored by a number of scholars, ranging from the use of language among Orthodox communities (Fader, 2009), secular metalinguistic communities (Avineri, 2012), and those who are seeking to become Orthodox and utilize language as a tool for socialization and acceptance (Benor, 2012). While the previous studies focus on Yiddish and Hebrew, studies on Ladino are relatively few. Kushner-Bishop (2004) reports on efforts to preserve and revitalize Ladino in Israel. In her research, she considers performativity in and through Ladino, much in the way that the previously-cited studies seek to