Judeo-Arabic as an Endangered Language: Memoir by Samantha Ellis

Samantha Ellis

2025

I’ve lost my Judeo-Iraqi Arabic to English, which is one of the most notorious of what linguists call predator languages or killer languages. [ . . . ] Some people call the languages that push out others bully languages, which makes more sense. There are reasons that over half of us speak just thirteen of the 7,000-odd languages spoken or signed in…

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This passage comes from Samantha Ellis’s memoir, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture (published in the United States as Always Carry Salt). The book discusses how Ellis’s family shifted from Judeo-Iraqi Arabic to English after migrating to the United Kingdom and her efforts to learn some of her childhood language. This excerpt focuses on one of the factors in the endangerment of Judeo-Arabic, the “revernacularization” of Hebrew, or the making of the Jewish language of prayer and texts into a vernacular like it was in antiquity. This passage uses several metaphors to portray various languages, and elsewhere in the book, Ellis describes Judeo-Arabic as “the intimate, vulnerable language of safety, of closeness, trust and belonging.”

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Creator Bio

Samantha Ellis

b. 1975

Samantha Ellis was born in London to an Iraqi Jewish family. Her father left Baghdad in 1951 for England, while her mother’s family immigrated in 1971. She is a playwright, screenwriter, and author, living in London. Aside from numerous plays, she has written How to Be a Heroine (2014), a memoir of reading fictional female characters; Take Courage (2017), a biography of Anne Brontë; and Chopping Onions on my Heart (2025, US title: Always Carry Salt), a memoir about the loss of the Iraqi Jewish dialect of Arabic.