Language contact

Given historical, religious, and societal realities of the population under consideration, Sephardim — and, thus, Ladino — have encountered a variety of languages. As such, one finds elements of Romance, Semitic, and Turkic, Hellenic, and Slavic languages throughout Ladino. Such points of contact are particularly evident at the lexical level of the language. Of course, the ways in which Ladino has interacted with different languages pertaining to these language families and the reasons for which they have emerged vary considerably throughout time. Though Castilian and other Iberian languages form the foundation of Ladino (Quintana, 2014; 2017), Sephardim have incorporated other Romance languages such as Italian and French into Ladino. Contact with Italian began as early as the 16th century due to shared spheres of commerce, navigation, diplomacy and, eventually, education (Minervini, 2014). In the case of Rhodes, formerly of the Ottoman Empire and now part of Greece, the Italian occupation of the island in 1912, which lasted until 1943, also solidified points of contact between languages. In light of westernizing ideologies, French also became a major point of contact among Ladino-speaking Sephardim. The establishment of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in 1860, which reached the Near East and North Africa, introduced French to young Sephardim who would eventually prioritize said language over Ladino and, naturally, introduce linguistic elements from the former language into the latter (Rodrigue, 1990). Sephiha (2012) suggests that the incorporation of French into Ladino became so widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that one could discuss contact between the two languages as Judeo-Fragnol.

Apart from the aforementioned Romance languages, which influenced the linguistic structure of Ladino in different ways both prior to and following the expulsion of Sephardim from Iberia, Hebrew and Aramaic are also commonplace in Ladino. Bunis (1993) accounts for more than 4,000 lexical items from both languages in Ladino, many of which trace to religious and cultural aspects related to (Sephardic) Jewry. One might find even more instances of Hebrew in particular considering contemporary points of contact among Sephardim residing in Israel. Arabic is also evident throughout Ladino, though contact with this language is most abundant and relevant when considering Haketia (Madkouri, 2006). Apart from these Semitic languages, Ladino incorporates abundant points of contact with the Ottoman languages, which surrounded Sephardim for centuries following 1492. Thus, one observes contact with Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian, particularly at the lexical level.

 Orthography

For centuries, Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardim utilized varieties of the Hebrew alphabet in writing: Meruba (block characters), Rashi (semi-cursive characters), and Solitreo (cursive characters). In any of the aforementioned instances, the language was orthographically represented from right to left, similar to conventions of the Hebrew language. While a variety of texts were printed by publishers in Rashi characters and, to a lesser extent, Meruba characters, Solitreo was reserved to pen correspondence between speakers and communities, as found in handwritten postcards, letters, ledgers, and minutes.

Today, Judeo-Spanish is written predominantly in Latin-based characters (romanization); the norms utilized in this piece are those which are now widely used by Ladino speakers (and writers), promoted by the National Authority of Ladino in Israel and established by the Aki Yerushalayim journal in 1979. Bunis (2019) notes that questions surrounding how speakers of Judeo-Spanish orthographically represented their language began to emerge throughout periodicals in the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, in 1866, in the Vienna (Rashi-printed) paper El Nasional, Yosef Kalvo called for the need to leave behind Sephardim’s “borrowed” Hebrew letters as well as words taken from “other” languages. In 1879, Sa’adi a-Levi, in his Salonican (Rashi-printed) paper La Epoka discussed how switching to Latin characters would be “great progress.” In both instances, editors promulgated ideologies concerning their Judeo-Spanish in the face of Peninsular Spanish; Kalvo refers to the latter as “puro” (pure) and a-Levi refers to it as “verdadero” and “vero” (true/real). Kalvo never ended up implementing such changes, and a-Levi rarely did so himself, particularly considering resistance from readers. However, when Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk implemented language reforms in 1928, resulting in Turkish switching from Arabic characters to Latin-based characters, Sephardim shortly followed suit with their Hebrew-based characters in Ladino. Thus, newspapers such as Elia Karmona’s Istanbul (Rashi-printed) Djugeton switched to Latin characters in 1931 and Issac Algazi’s Istanbul La Boz del Oriente began its publication in romanization in that same year.

 Select linguistic properties

To the ear, Ladino sounds very much like a variety of Spanish; however, despite a great deal of mutual intelligibility, Ladino retains myriad linguistic properties that distinguish it from the Spanish of Spain or the Americas. As Penny (2000) notes, Ladino demonstrates properties of 1) retention, 2) innovation, and 3) simplifications. Quintana (2006) has posited the emergence of different koines among Ladino-speaking communities, one in Istanbul and another in Salonica.

In regard to the phonemic inventory of Ladino, the language retains sounds once used in Castilian, which have fallen out of use in Spain and the Americas. Due to contact with languages like Turkish, French, and Italian, previous distributions and sound patterns have developed in their own right. One of the most noticeable retentions found in Ladino is in regard to the sounds [ʒ], [dʒ], and [ʃ], which have all collapsed into [x] or a further retracted place of articulation in the Spanish of Spain and the Americas. Thus, compare the Ladino words mu[ʒ]er ‘woman,’ [dʒ]ente ‘people,’ and le[ʃ]os ‘far’ to Spanish mu[x]er, [x]ente, and le[x]os. In words of Hispanic origin, voiced prepalatal fricative [ʒ] maintains complementary distribution with voiced prepalatal affricate [dʒ]; the latter occurs in word-initial position, as in the aforementioned example, and after a nasal consonant (e.g. beren[dʒ]ena ‘eggplant’). As Kushner-Bishop (2004) explains “the retention of three sibilants, where in Modern [Peninsular and Latin American] Spanish only one remains, is perhaps the most pronounced phonological distinction today between Judeo-Spanish and Modern Spanish, not to mention the one most jealously guarded by Judeo-Spanish speakers” (p. 41). For those unfamiliar with how to pronounce these phones, said sounds also exist in English: [ʒ] as produced in articulating the <s> in the word <measure>; [dʒ] as in the <j> in the word <jungle>; and [ʃ] as in the <sh> in the word <shopping>.

At the morphological level, one finds interaction from the languages with which Ladino has entered into contact. For example, the Turkish agentive suffix -ci is rendered in Ladino as -djí or chí; the former typically occurs after a vowel or voiced consonant and the latter after a voiceless consonant. In Ladino, this suffix is used in words of Turkish origin, such as dondurmadjí “ice cream maker” or zarzavatchi “vegetable seller”. This suffix is also productive, however, in the sense that it has been used in combination of words not originating from Turkish; examples include pizmondji “singer of religious hymns” (Bunis, 2016, p. 413), of a Hebrew base, and shinedji “shoe shiner” (FitzMorris, 2019, p. 165), of an English base. Pluralization of this suffix is in accordance with Spanish; thus rendering pizmondjis and shinedjis in the latter two examples. As such, one can see how Ladino is able to incorporate a variety of morphological elements in a single word; in the former example, we observe Hebrew, Turkish, and Spanish, and in the latter, English, Turkish, and Spanish.

This section presents only a couple of instances regarding retention and innovation in regard to Ladino and, thus, is not an exhaustive list. For a comprehensive review of Ladino dialectology, Quintana’s (2006) Geografía lingüística del judeoespañol offers a synchronic and diachronic exploration of linguistic properties primarily at the lexical, phonological, and morphological levels of the language.