Judeo-Provençal
| Judæo-Occitan | |
|---|---|
| Shuadit | |
| שואדית | |
| Native to | France (Provence) |
| Extinct | 1977, with the death of Armand Lunel |
|
Indo-European
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | (insufficiently attested or not a distinct language)shua1252
|
Shuadit (also spelled Chouhadite, Chouhadit, Chouadite, Chouadit, and Shuhadit), also called Judeo-Occitan or less accurately Judæo-Provençal or Judeo-Comtadin, is the Occitan language as it was historically spoken by French Jews. It was not a distinct language, and was indistinguishable from the Occitan spoken by non-Jews (Banitt 1963, Pansier 1925, Guttel & Aslanov 2006:560). Shuadit is known from documents dating to as early as the 11th century in France, and after suffering drastic declines beginning with the charter of the Inquisition in France, finally died out with the death of its last known speaker, Armand Lunel, in 1977.
Shuadit writings consist of two distinct varieties: religious texts and popular prose, written using modifications of the Hebrew alphabet.
Religious texts contain a significantly higher incidence of Hebrew loanwords, and reflect an overall more "educated" style, containing many words from Old French, Franco-Provençal, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin. These texts include a fragment of a 14th-century poem lauding Queen Esther, as well as a woman's siddur. This siddur contains an uncommon blessing, found in few other locations (including medieval Lithuania), thanking God, in the morning blessings, not for making her "according to His will" (she-asani kirtzono), but for making her as a woman.
The extant texts comprising the collections of popular prose contain far fewer borrowings, and are essentially Occitan written using the Hebrew script, possibly indicating a Jewish preference, prevalent at the time, for not using the Latin script, regarded widely as synonymous with the oppressive Christian régimes. These texts demonstrate the extent to which the Jewish community of Provence was familiar with Hebrew, as well as the extent to which the community was integrated into the larger surrounding Christian culture of the region.
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