Judaeo-Spanish | |
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Ladino | |
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The Rashi script, originally used to write the language
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Pronunciation | [dʒuˈðeo espaˈɲol] |
Native to | Israel, Turkey, US, France, Spain, Greece, Brazil, UK, Morocco, Bulgaria, Italy, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia, Tunisia, Belgium, South Africa, Austria and others |
Ethnicity | Sephardic Jews and Sabbateans |
Native speakers
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(112,130 in Israel cited 1985) 10,000 in Turkey (2007) |
Indo-European
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Dialects | Eastern/Oriental; Western/Occidental; Haketia |
mainly Latin alphabet; (originally Rashi and Solitreo) also Hebrew and Cyrillic and rarely Greek and Arabic | |
Official status | |
Recognised minority
language in |
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Regulated by | none |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-2 |
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ISO 639-3 |
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Linguist list
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lad |
Glottolog | ladi1251 |
Linguasphere | 51-AAB-ba ... 51-AAB-bd |
Judaeo-Spanish (also Judeo-Spanish and Judæo-Spanish: Judeo-Español, Hebrew script: גֿודֿיאו-איספאנייול, Cyrillic: Җудео-Еспаңол, with many variant spellings in all three scripts, as in the box at right), commonly referred to as Ladino, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. Originally spoken in the former territories of the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa) as well as in France, Italy, Netherlands, Morocco, and the UK, today it is spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, most of the speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, France and Turkey.
The core vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is Old Spanish and it has numerous elements from all the old Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Old Aragonese, Astur-Leonese, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese and Mozarabic. The language has been further enriched by Ottoman Turkish and Semitic vocabulary, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, especially in the domains of religion, law and spirituality and most of the vocabulary for new and modern concepts has been adopted through French and Italian. Furthermore, the language is influenced to a lesser degree by other local languages of the Balkans, such as Greek, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian.