INTRODUCTION

Ladino is a language spoken by Sephardic Jews. The language developed among Jews who settled predominantly throughout the Ottoman Empire — southeastern Europe and Asia Minor — following their expulsions from Castile, Aragon, Navarre (Spain), and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century. Sepharad refers to the Iberian Peninsula and, thus, is the term from which Sephardic Jews or Sephardim take their name; in Hebrew, Sepharad means Spain. As Flesler & Pérez Melgosa (2020) observes, the term “also, and perhaps more powerfully, refers to a constructed imaginary geography in which the Iberian Peninsula stands, among other things, for the often idealized era when Jews inhabited Iberia prior to 1492” (p. 5).

The nomenclature of this language varies considerably. Though Ladino is among the most common names for this language today, speakers have often utilized other terms, which have emphasized the language’s relation to Judaism (e.g. judezmo, djidió, djudió) or Spanish (e.g. espanyol, espanyol muestro, spanyolit). Judeo-Spanish is another commonly used term, which highlights both of the aforementioned aspects of the language. Haketia refers to the variety spoken by descendants of Sephardim who migrated primarily to north Morocco after expulsion from Iberia. Apart from the use of Ladino to refer to the spoken vernacular of Sephardim, said term has also been reserved to refer to a calque variety of the language, found in select religious texts, based on Hebrew syntax and lexicon of primarily Hispanic origin.

In Ottoman lands and under Ottoman leadership, Stein (2002) observes that “Sephardim were able to blossom culturally, socially, and economically: not only as a discrete community but in symbiosis with the multi-lingual and multi-sectarian peoples alongside whom they lived” (p. 226). The relative autonomy granted to non-Muslim groups, such as the Jewish population, provided for the intergenerational transmission of Ladino. While the millet system protected minority populations, it still considered them “socially and juridically inferior to the Muslims,” however  (Rodrigue, 1995, p. 239). With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the eventual establishment of the modern republic of Turkey in 1922, Sephardim experienced assimilation in a way that did not allow for the same conducive environment that allowed them to preserve Ladino in the past.

Though Ladino once served as a majority language within Sephardic populations and as a lingua franca between them, it is a minority language in regard to the nation-states where it is found. Perhaps the closest Ladino ever came to being a majority language, at least in regard to the population in question, was in Salonica, which may have logged the largest Sephardic faction compared to other groups as early as the 1830s (Naar, 2016, p. 56). The genocide that was the Holocaust, however, which resulted in the murder of more than 90% of Sephardim in places like in Greece and the Balkans, as well as massive assimilation in Turkey and all subsequent regions where Sephardim migrated, have caused Ladino not only to be a minority language but an endangered one as well. One is hard-pressed to find speakers of the language today below the age of 65. Nevertheless, Ladino is still a living language, used in a limited number of domains and post-vernacular modalities.