1- Why is Haketía considered a minority/ized language or culture?

Haketía is currently a very minority language, but it is reluctant to disappear because such a disappearance would also mean the definitive loss of the Sephardic cultural heritage. At this point of the 21st century it is not the mother tongue of any community of speakers, but it continues to be used as a language of family reference, as a shared unifying element of Sephardic Jews who consider it the language of love, tenderness and childhood memories, as Sol Genafo a Jewish woman, and classical filologist whose works have focused on issues related to jaquetía, explains in her writings (Genafo, 2020).
Strictly speaking, Haketía cannot be considered a language because for that it should comply with certain requirements that establish criteria for linguistic normalization, such a minimum number of speakers, or the existence of a literary corpus.
Today, it does not meet these criteria. Historically it is considered a language It is difficult to know today the number of Haketía speakers because, as we said, it is a language with a very limited use. The researcher Terhi Silvola-Bendayan (2019) conducted a survey to know first-hand the situation of Haketía and Haketía speakers in the 21st century. Among her conclusions, 92% of respondents said they feel happy to hear someone speaking in Haketía and a similar percentage believed it is a good idea for their descendants to learn
to speak Haketía. Silvila-Bendayan also drew some conclusions that corroborate Genafo’s hypothesis: speaking in this language means for the Sephardic community bringing back the memory of their relatives. The language remains an important part of their identity as it serves as a nostalgic memory. Remembering the language provokes feelings of sadness for an idealized past that has been lost even though, in many cases, the individual may have no personal memory of this past as these were born after their families had emigrated from Morocco. In addition, Haketía is one of the most important symbols and ties to their medieval Hispanic roots and their identity as a people. Other feelings that are aroused is the memory of a deep poverty. This is understood as the result of the stories told by their elders about the hardships lived after the expulsions from Spain in around 15th century and the hard stages of exile and settlement.

2- Was Haketía ever a majority language or culture?

Haketía was never a majority language. Haketía, derived from the Castilian romance language, is the name given to the language that emerged from the Spanish spoken by the Jews settled in the north of Morocco expelled from the Iberian Peninsula from 1492 onwards, after contact with other languages such as Hebrew, Moroccan Dariya, Portuguese, French or even English for those living in the international city of Tangier. In the 15th century, Haketía speakers were already a minority of the Moroccan population in general, but they were also a minority among the Dariya-speaking Moroccan Jews living in Morocco historically, before the arrival of the Sephardim exiled, those Jews who, after the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula, settled in Morocco, instead of in places further east in the Mediterranean like those who did so in territories of the Ottoman Empire whose language is known by the name of Ladino.

3- What were the circumstances that led to the shift from majority to minority?

The progressive loss of this language began in the beginning of the 20th century and the regular contact between the Moroccan Jewish population and those Europeans who settled in the territory during the establishment of the Protectorate over the Alawi Kingdom. If until that time it was the native language of the Jewish community, at that point the Haketía began to suffer a further restriction in its scope of use and remained confined to home use. The reasons through which this restriction of the use of the language are usually explained does not correspond to any specific law, but rather to a the current of thought that extends among the Haketía speaking families at the beginning of the 20th century. Families who had business and close relationship with Spanish and French people start to consider the use of Haketía as a synonym of social retardation associated with traditional labor, or with less economic mobility and stopped teaching this language to their descendants. They believed that abandoning the use of the language of their ancestors would help them to progress socially and economically, hence the number of Haketía speakers was drastically reduced during the central decades of the 20th century.

4- What is the crucial information one should know to have a basic understanding of the major cultural or linguistic features of this community?

The origin of the Haketía speakers’s community in Morocco must be placed around the year 1492CE when the first emigrations of Sephardic Jews to the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar began. Undoubtedly, they came with the cultural heritage from alAndalus: customs, meals, religious modes and of course language. This Hispanic heritage was evident in the populations of northern Morocco, particularly in Tetouan,Tangier, Larache, Alcazarquivir and Arcila, where there were remarkable communities of Sephardic Jews committed to preserving their way of life, but the permeability of the community was inevitable, and the language would be one of the aspects that reflected it most. Thus, time went by forming what we have come to call Haketía. A language with many different influences from those other languages with which it was in contact: Hebrew, Moroccan Dariya, French, Portuguese, English or Greek, and of course, modern Spanish.