Jewish Languages and Linguistics

This paper offers a critical analysis of Rabbinic sources concerning the the history of Loshon HaQodesh. The paper first attempts to define the language known as "Loshon HaQodesh" and then trace its origins through Midrashic and Talmudic sources. The paper also follows the rise and decline of this language.
A more complete version of this paper was printed in Nov. 2014 under the name Lashon HaKodesh: History, Holiness, & Hebrew (Mosaica Press, 2014).

The paper is constructed as a reply to Alexander Beider's paper in the maiden issue of "Journal of Jewish Languages" and also to Brill's editors' policies both in permitting personal invective against Max Weinreich, Solomon Birnbaum and other towering giants of Yiddish linguistics. The crux of this paper's argument is that the comparative method trumps on all counts the Wexlerian construction of multiple hypothesized languages and interrrelationships based on some curious stray lexical items. Paper is in Yiddish, abstract in English.

A historical overview in Judezmo of the use of Romanization for writing Judezmo (Ladino, Judeo-Spanish) followed by a description of the Romanization rules advocated today by the La Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino i Su Kultura and the Akademia Nasional del Ladino en Israel (Jerusalem).

Course description
What happens when ethnic and religious groups immigrate to new lands and pick up new languages? This class explores language contact using the case study of the Jewish Diaspora. Hebrew and Yiddish are widely associated with Judaism, but most people are not aware of the many languages Jews have spoken throughout history, including Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Malayalam (India), and Judeo-Shirazi (Iran). This class offers an introduction to this linguistic diversity, focusing on 21st-century “postvernacular” engagement. Phenomena covered include Moroccan and Yemenite Judeo-Arabic music in Israel, Hebrew and Ladino word of the day at American Jewish summer camps, Harry Potter and Black Lives Matter in Yiddish, and gendered language patterns in Hasidic communities. Through this Jewish case study, students will gain an understanding of the hybrid language practices of immigrant and religious groups.

Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present Editors: Benjamin Hary and Sarah Bunin Benor In the series: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, De Gruyter Mouton (Berlin), November 2018 Since Joshua Fishman’s seminal work in the 1980s (e.g., Fishman, Joshua A., ed. 1985. Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. Leiden: Brill), there has been a good deal of research on languages in Jewish communities. This research has mostly been either structural or sociological but not both. Our volume brings together these two research traditions, offering sociological and structural descriptions of languages used in about 20 Diaspora Jewish communities, along with synthesizing descriptive and theoretical articles about the structure and sociology of languages in these and other communities. Using the construct of the continuum of Jewish linguistic distinctiveness, we posit “Jewish languages” as a historical and contemporary phenomenon. With a few exceptions, including Yiddish in Slavic lands and Ladino/Judeo-Spanish/Judezmo in Ottoman lands, Jews have tended to speak variants of the local non-Jewish languages. The distinctiveness of these variants has ranged from minor to major, depending on the degree of Jews’ integration into the surrounding populations, their orientation toward rabbinic texts, and other factors. While much previous research on Jewish languages assumes that the phenomenon essentially ended with modernity, this volume highlights its 21st-century manifestation.

Jews in the United States use many Hebrew and Yiddish words in their English conversation. To what extent do non-Jews pick up these linguistic markers? This paper explains how Yiddish words have become part of the broader American lexicon through social networks, the media and entertainment, commodification, and metalinguistic discourse. Yiddish words like kibitz, bupkis, and schmuck acquired a comedic valence and an association with New York through their use by second- and third-generation Jewish entertainers. Some words, like klutz, maven, and pastrami, have become so entrenched in English that most Americans are not aware of their Jewish origins. The word chutzpah became part of political discourse, but its continuing association with Jews sometimes leads to controversy. Recently, non-Jews’ notion of Jewish language has expanded from Yiddish as a source of humor to the more serious use of Textual Hebrew in the religious domain and Modern Hebrew in Israeli contexts.
Non-Jews’ use of Jewish language represent diverse orientations toward Jews: from respect to romance, from humor to hatred. Those who are “Jew-adjacent” – friends, spouses, co-workers, etc. – tend to use Jewish English in respectful ways. Politicians speaking to Jewish groups use Hebrew and Yiddish strategically, yielding diverse reactions across the political spectrum. Some devout Christians study Hebrew and use elements of Jewish English because Jesus was a Jew. An insidious use of Jewish language is white nationalists mocking Jews with words like Goyim and Shoah. These phenomena are discussed in historical context and in comparison to out-group use of language associated with other ethnic groups.

Citation: Benor, Sarah Bunin. 2022. “Pastrami, Verklempt, and Tshootspa: Non-Jews’ Use of Jewish Language in the US.” American Jewish Year Book, 2020. Arnold Dashefsky and Ira M. Sheskin, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. 3-69.

Jewish languages contain a component derived from Hebrew and Aramaic, the earliest languages Jews used. We offer a historical comparative analysis of the structure and use of adjectives of Hebrew and Aramaic origin in the diverse spoken and written registers of Judezmo (Ladino, Judeo-Spanish) and Yiddish, the two major Jewish languages of the Sephardim and Ashkenazim of Europe. Attention is paid both to adjectives whose forms are entirely of Hebrew or Aramaic origin, as well as those constructed of bases of Hebrew and Aramaic origin, and derivational morphemes of Hispanic and Turkish origin (Judezmo), and Germanic and Slavic origin (Yiddish). The incorporation of the adjectives within the syntactic and semantic systems of Judezmo and Yiddish is examined , and comparisons made between the relative quantity and function of the adjectives in the two languages. It is meant as a model for the comparative study of the linguistic structures of Jewish languages.

This chapter discusses a contested case where language planners committed to revival applied Heinz Kloss’s Ausbau theory of weaker languages ‘too similar’ to stronger languages needing to be ‘made further’ by means of normative planning. Katz argues that the purist strain of revivalism that emerged pitted its followers against the aging native-speaker writers and speakers of the language. This was followed in short order by an unexpected dramatic demographic increase in traditionally religious communities, whose language use (and more generally, traditionalist beliefs) the revivalists do not approve of, leading to further layers of alienation. The author asserts that the case of Yiddish can serve as a warning that well-intentioned revivalism coupled with Ausbauist purism can be counterproductive. The chapter, rooted in the classic descriptivist stance, provides a glimpse into the complex interfaces of revivalism, corpus planning, and non-linguistic alienation. A 1000-year prehistory of the debate is provided for context.

This paper presents and analyses half a page of Uzbek text that appears in a Tajik-language prose work published at the turn of the 20th century. The Uzbek text was written by a Bukharan bilingual who had Bukharan Tajik as his native language but also possessed competence in Uzbek. The text is a rare example of an Uzbek text written in fully vocalized Hebrew script, and thus provides a rare glimpse into the Tajik-Uzbek bilingualism in the capital area of the emirate of Bukhara in the late 19th century.

Jewish English writing uses multiple combinations of the Hebrew and English alphabets. This paper demonstrates those uses, giving examples from rabbinic literature, Yiddish and Ladino newspapers, handwritten notes, pedagogical materials, organizations' and restaurants' logos, and regalia advertising sports teams, universities, and political candidates. The analysis demonstrates that hybrid combinations of Hebrew and English writing serve four functions: 1) Translanguaging: Enabling people who have access to (elements of) English and a traditionally Hebrew-script language (Yiddish, Ladino, Modern Hebrew, Textual Hebrew, Textual Jewish Aramaic) to represent both languages in the same text; 2) Symbolism: Highlighting English-speaking Jews' Jewish and other identities simultaneously; 3) Code: Communicating coded messages to other Jews; and 4) Pedagogy: Teaching Hebrew decoding to English speakers or teaching English to readers of Yiddish or Ladino. Digraphic texts are bivalent, seen as part of multiple languages simultaneously.

The Ibero-Romance-speaking Jews of medieval Christian Iberia were linguistically distinct from their non-Jewish neighbors primarily as a result of their language's unique Hebrew-Aramaic component; preservations from older Jewish Greek, Latin, and Arabic; a tradition of translating sacred Hebrew and Aramaic texts into their language using archaisms and Hebrew-Aramaic rather than Hispanic syntax; and their Hebrew-letter writing system. With the expulsions from Iberia in the late 15th century, most of the Sephardim who continued to maintain their Iberianorigin language resettled in the Ottoman Empire, with smaller numbers in North Africa and Italy. Their forced migration, and perhaps a conscious choice, essentially disconnected the Sephardim from the Spanish language as it developed in Iberia and Latin America, causing their language-which they came to call laðino 'Romance', ʤuðezmo or ʤuðjó 'Jewish, Judezmo', and more recently (ʤudeo)espaɲol 'Judeo-Spanish'-to appear archaic when compared with modern Spanish. In their new locales the Sephardim developed the Hispanic component of their language along independent lines, resulting in further differentiation from Spanish. Divergence was intensified through borrowing from contact languages of the Ottoman Empire such as Turkish, Greek, and South Slavic. Especially from the late 18th century, factors such as the colonializing interests of France, Italy, and Austro-Hungary in the region led to considerable influence of their languages on Judezmo. In the 19th century, the dismemberment of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and their replacement by highly nationalistic states resulted in a massive language shift to the local languages; that factor, followed by large speech-population losses during World War II and immigration to countries stressing linguistic homogeneity, have in recent years made Judezmo an endangered language.

From the 19th–20th-century beginnings of modern linguistics, scholars reported on various results of interactions between diverse language speakers; but it was only with Uriel Weinreich's Languages in Contact (1953) that a solid theoretical basis for the systematic study of contact linguistics was elaborated. The present article studies lexical influences from South Slavic on Judezmo (Ladino/Judeo-Spanish) resulting from contact during the 16th–19th centuries between speakers of these two languages in the regions that, between 1918 and 1992, were known jointly as Yugoslavia. During the Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian periods, borrowings in local Judezmo from South Slavic were relatively few compared with Turkisms. But from the nineteenth century, when the South Slavs gained political independence, Serbo-Croatian exerted an ever-increasing influence on Judezmo in this region. The case of Judezmo there differs considerably from Yiddish in Slavic Eastern Europe throughout the same period, as described by Uriel Weinreich and others.

From the 19th–20th-century beginnings of modern linguistics, scholars reported on various results of interactions between diverse language speakers; but it was only with Uriel Weinreich’s Languages in Contact (1953) that a solid theoretical basis for the systematic study of contact linguistics was elaborated. The present article studies lexical influences from South Slavic on Judezmo (Ladino/Judeo-Spanish) resulting from contact during the 16th–19th centuries between speakers of these two languages in the regions that, between 1918 and 1992, were known jointly as Yugoslavia. During the Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian periods, borrowings in local Judezmo from South Slavic were relatively few compared with Turkisms. But from the nineteenth century, when the South Slavs gained political independence, Serbo-Croatian exerted an ever-increasing influence on Judezmo in this region. The case of Judezmo there differs considerably from Yiddish in Slavic Eastern Europe throughout the same pe...

A bibliography of works about the life and career of Max Weinreich, a leading figure in YIVO (The Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna, later New York) and pioneer in the fields of Yiddish Studies and Jewish interlinguistics. Apart from his magnum opus, The History of the Yiddish Language, Weinreich is best known for popularizing the quip, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

This volume contains a study of multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic in addition to a critical edition, annotated translation, and a cultural and a grammatical study of The Purim Scroll of the Cairene Jewish Community, written in 1524 to commemorate the deliverance of the Jews of Cairo from Ahmad Pasha, the governor of Egypt.
'Multiglossia' is a linguistic state in which different varieties of a language exist side by side in a language community and are used under different circumstances or with various functions. 'Judeo-Arabic' has been written and spoken in various forms by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
Part One places the language of the Judeo-Arabic text of the Scroll within the multiglossic history of Judeo-Arabic. Part Two introduces the two critical editions of the Scroll, both in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, with the variant readings followed by an annotated translation. Part Three presents a detailed grammar of the Scroll using the framework of Judeo-Arabic multiglossia.

In this chapter, we present a research agenda for the comparative linguistic study of Jewish communities. We
survey past scholarship, discuss preliminaries for comparative study, propose some research questions, and offer reasons why this type of analysis is important.

The Judezmo writer Alexandre Benghiat was widely appreciated for his popular, light and often humorous literary style. His writings were mostly praised by fellow Judezmo writers and published in numerous Judezmo journals inside and outside his native Izmir, including his own periodical El Meseret [“The Joy”]; and since the turn of the twentieth century his compositions have been cited, analyzed and anthologized by researchers. Until World War I most of his writings were relatively optimistic. But with the War and its disastrous consequences for the residents of Izmir much of Ben ghiat’s writing became more somber. In 1919 Benghiat published the Judezmo diary that he had kept during the War, describing the tribulations of the Izmir residents, especially its Jews, and particularly his own plight. This article previews the diary, which will be published in its entirety by the author of the article.

Yiddish, Parte Seconda:

Partendo dalla raccolta delle tesi elaborate con gli studi di sociolinguistica sulla relatività delle nozioni di “lingua” e “dialetto”, etichette sociolinguistiche elaborate per sistemi linguistici essenzialmente sempre tali, si analizza come le lingue ebraiche siano esempi classici di questa formulazione instabile e scorretta.
In particolare si tratterà del ladino o ebraico-spagnolo e dello yiddish o ebraico-tedesco.
Saranno quindi analizzati in una prospettiva storica, linguistica e sociolinguistica.
Questi tipi di analisi poi non escludono un’analisi generica della situazione sociolinguistica in Israele e un confronto israeliano tra castigliano-tedesco moderni da una parte quali sistemi linguistici considerati “lingue” e ladino e yiddish dall’altra, quali sistemi linguistici considerati di norma “dialetti”.
Le conclusioni rilevate ruotano ad un’inversione di percezione sociolinguistica di questi sistemi linguistici, tale per cui ciò che fuori di Israele viene considerato o un “dialetto” o una “variante regionale” della lingua standard, in Israele questi sistemi linguistici sono considerati a tutti gli effetti “lingue”.
Promosse, tutelate e conservate come simbolo della cultura ebraica sefardita (il ladino) e askenazita (lo yiddish).
Nello specifico radio, stampa, televisione, Internet e scuola sono i contesti utilizzati per rilevare tali conclusioni.
Inoltre tra gli aspetti rilevanti di questo studio si ritiene opportuno parlare dell’analisi sociolinguistica delle lingue ebraiche nei secoli, in quanto le fonti di analisi sono strettamente letterarie, il loro accostamento all’ebraico israeliano in Israele, in quanto accomunate dall’uso costante e comune dei caratteri ebraici, e le osservazioni traduttologiche potenzialmente rilevabili indirettamente.
Le parole chiave quindi da rilevare per questo studio sociolinguistico delle lingue ebraiche sono: sociolinguistica, traduttologia, studi ebraici, opposizione
lingua-dialetto, ladino, yiddish, Israele.

This paper attempts to extrapolate from the responsa literature of the Ottoman Sephardic rabbis of the seventeenth century the main features of the Judezmo which Nathan of Gaza  would have heard and used in Eres Israel in particular and in Gaza in general. It also uses that literature to survey the personal names borne by Sephardic, Mizrahi or Oriental and Ashkenazi Jews during that period.