Class 1: Jewish Languages: Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and Beyond

Hebrew and Diaspora Jewish Languages

Hebrew was the spoken language of the Jewish people in antiquity and has been central to Jewish life through the centuries, even when Jews have spoken other languages. Jews have continued to use Hebrew when they study and recite sacred texts from the Bible and Mishnah and daily, weekly, and annual prayers. But for as long as there have been Jews, there have been Jews who lived outside of the land of Israel and who used other languages for day-to-day communication. When the Babylonian and Persian Empires controlled ancient Palestine (626–332 BCE), Jews gradually shifted from Hebrew to Aramaic. Subsequent imperial conquests and migrations led to Jews speaking Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Persian, and Judeo-Arabic. In later periods, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-German, Judeo-Tajik (Bukharian), and other languages developed in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and Western Asia. 

Like Judeo-Aramaic, these Jewish languages were similar to the surrounding languages but were influenced to varying extents by the Hebrew (and Aramaic) of Jewish sacred texts. They were generally written in Hebrew letters (as seen in the multilingual omer counter). Historically, Ladino was written in Hebrew letters, but in Turkey in the 1920s, Latin letters were adopted, which influenced Ladino writing around the world. Jewish languages sometimes differed in other ways as well, using distinctive pronunciations or grammatical features (as in the Yiddish-influenced “should” and “learning” in this yeshiva promotional video). Some of these languages differed from the local non-Jewish language by only a few embedded Hebrew words, but others have been so different in grammar and pronunciation that Jews and non-Jews could barely communicate. 

Migration and the History of Yiddish and Ladino

Most of these languages were only spoken by Jews in the countries where the languages developed. But the two most famous diaspora Jewish languages, Yiddish and Ladino (also known as Judeo-Spanish), are exceptions in this history, as they were widespread outside their lands of origin. This geographical dispersion was caused by the migration of large numbers of Jews from one region to another. Jews who spoke Western Yiddish, also known as Judeo-German, moved eastward from areas where their neighbors also spoke varieties of German to areas where their neighbors spoke Slavic and other languages, including Czech, Polish, Belarusian, and Hungarian. Rather than adopt those languages for in-group communication, they maintained their Germanic language and added new words, pronunciations, and grammatical features from the new local languages. Similarly, Jews were expelled from Spain in the late fifteenth century and moved to Morocco, Turkey, Greece, and elsewhere. Rather than adopt Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and other new local languages, they maintained Judeo-Spanish. Inevitably, though, they acquired some knowledge of those languages, and gradually some words, especially from Ottoman Turkish and Moroccan Arabic, became part of Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, Judezmo, Spanyol, and, in North Africa, Haketia. 

Cultural Contact and the Evolution of Judeo-Arabic

In contrast to Yiddish and Ladino, the many dialects of Judeo-Arabic are linguistically close to their surrounding non-Jewish dialects. Jews in Yemen, Syria, and Algeria sounded more similar to their Arabic-speaking Muslim and Christian neighbors in each of those places than they did to each other. Their languages differed by the use of Hebrew and Aramaic words (e.g., laylat (a)l-fasaḥ, which combines the Arabic words layla, “night,” and al, “the,” with the Hebrew word pasaḥ, “Passover”). Judeo-Arabic also sometimes exhibited archaic pronunciations. In Yefren, Libya, the historical Arabic q sound (like a k but lower in the throat) is still used, while in the local Muslim Arabic dialect, the sound has shifted to g. Another distinctive feature of Judeo-Arabic dialects is the influence of Arabic-speaking Jewish communities that lived far away. In Cairo, Egypt, Judeo-Arabic includes a verb form from Morocco and a plural form from Baghdad. In some regions, Jewish and non-Jewish Arabic varieties were more distinct from each other. In Baghdad, listeners could generally tell whether a speaker was Muslim, Christian, or Jewish based on their pronunciation and even on the vocabulary they used; for example, Jews would say dūni and Muslims mūzēn for “bad.”

Language Revivals and New Dialects

Most longstanding Jewish languages, like Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Bukharian, are now endangered because of genocide, migration, pressure to assimilate, and government or school mandates that particular languages be used for instruction. Most Jews today live in Israel or the United States and have learned Modern Israeli Hebrew (based on ancient Hebrew but influenced by modern languages) or English, but they engage with their ancestral languages in new ways, for example through heritage words, songs, and language learning. New Jewish languages have continued to emerge, including Jewish English, Jewish Latin American Spanish, and Jewish Swedish.