page_title: Jewish languages
section_title: Classification
hierarchical_section_title: Jewish languages / Classification
caption_attribution_description: English: Yiddish Bus Stop signs. Yiddish text on upper sign says: "Kiryas Joel Bus Transportation, Bus Stop." Yiddish text on lower sign says: "Village Bus Stop."
context_page_description: Jewish languages are the various languages and dialects that developed in Jewish communities in the diaspora. The original Jewish language is Hebrew, which was supplanted as the primary vernacular by Aramaic following the Babylonian exile. Jewish languages feature a syncretism of indigenous Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic with the languages of the local non-Jewish population. Many Sephardic Jews upon returning to Israel brought with them Arabic. Being born in such countries as Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon, they were native speakers of Arabic. It is common to hear Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs having indepth conversations in both Arabic and Hebrew.
context_section_description: Jewish languages are generally defined as the unique linguistic varieties of Jewish communities in the diaspora in their contact with surrounding non-Jewish languages. Languages vary in their distance and divergence from their non-Jewish sister languages. For example, Judeo-Yemeni Arabic is quite similar to some non-Jewish varieties of Yemeni Arabic, while Yiddish, a Germanic language, shows a high degree of dissimilarity to modern German dialects. Due to continued liturgical and literary use of Hebrew and Aramaic, Jewish communities were naturally in a state of diglossia. Along with their vernacular Jewish language, most Jews could read and write in Hebrew, which was necessary to fulfill the religious commandment to learn Torah and teach it. Jews were expected to also have knowledge of Judeo-Aramaic, the language of religious commentary (targumim) as well as many prayers, including the Kaddish. Hebrew, the "Holy Tongue", was the highest linguistic register in these communities, used for liturgy and study. Hebrew-Aramaic is the only adstratum shared by all Jewish languages. 
  Some Jewish languages have multiple registers; for example, both Yiddish and Judezmo have three linguistic registers: colloquial, written, and scholarly-liturgical.
  Some Jewish languages show the effects of the history of language shift among the speakers, including Hebrew-Aramaic influence. Yiddish exemplifies such a language. Some Jewish languages may become marked as distinctively Jewish because some shift affected some parts of the language as a whole. For example, what is today known as Baghdad Jewish Arabic (because it is the Arabic variety that was up until recently spoken by Baghdad's Jews) was originally the Arabic dialect of Baghdad itself and was used by all religious groups in Baghdad, but the Muslim residents of Baghdad later adopted Bedouin dialects of Arabic. Similarly, a dialect may be perceived as Jewish because its Jewish speakers brought the dialect of another region with them when they were displaced. In some cases this may cause a dialect to be perceived as "Jewish" in some regions but not in others.
  Some Jewish language varieties may not be classified as languages due to mutual intelligibility with their parent language, as with Judeo-Malayalam and Judeo-Spanish. In the case of Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, linguistically it is a dialect of Spanish, mutually intelligible with other Spanish dialects and varieties, albeit with each Spanish dialect having loanwords and influences from different source languages: Nahuatl and Maya loanwords and influences for Mexican Spanish; Quechua and Aymara in Peruvian Spanish; Italian, Quechua and Guaraní in Argentinian Spanish; Maghrebi Arabic and Berber in "Ladino Occidental" (also known as Haketia); Levantine Arabic, Greek, Turkish and South Slavic in "Ladino Oriental".
  In some cases, as with Ladino, a register may be developed for Biblical translation and exegesis in which Hebrew-Aramaic patterns are frequently calqued, though the number of true Hebrew and/or Aramaic loanwords may be low. Another possibility is that Jews may speak the same language as their non-Jewish neighbors, but occasionally insert Hebrew-Aramaic or other Jewish elements. This is a transitory state in the shift from use of a Jewish to a non-Jewish language, often made in the context of assimilation. This occurred, for example, with many educated German Jews who transitioned from Western Yiddish to German. This variety of German, used between 1760 and the end of the 19th century (the Haskala), was written with the Hebrew alphabet, and contained a small number of Hebrew and Yiddish loans. An example is Moses Mendelsohn's translation of the Hebrew Bible into German written with Hebrew letters.
caption: Signs in English and transliterated English (in Yiddish orthography) in the predominantly Hasidic area of Kiryas Joel, New York
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