Judaeo-Romance languages

Judaeo-Aragonese was spoken in north-central Spain from the around the mid-8th century to around the time of the Alhambra Decree, which expelled Jews from Spain. Later, it either merged with the various Judeo-Spanish dialects or fell out of use, to be replaced by the far more influential Judeo-Spanish dialects from Southern Spain, especially in the areas occupied by the modern lands of Valencia, Murcia and Andalucia.

Judaeo-Catalan was a Catalan dialect in Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands before the 1492 expulsion of the Alhambra Decree. It is unknown when Jews abandoned the language. While numerous Catalan texts written in the Hebrew language survive, whether or not they truly represent a dialect is debated. Some scholars, while conceding that the evidence for the language is scarce, still defend Judaeo-Catalan's status as a language,[1] whereas other scholars deny such a language ever truly existed,[2] or, contend that the evidence is too limited to take any position on the matter at all.[3]

Judaeo-French was a Jewish language of Northern France, the Low Countries and western Germany.

Judaeo-Italian, sometimes called "Italkian", a term coined by Solomon Birnbaum in 1942, has gone extinct except for one variety, now spoken fluently by fewer than 200 people. They speak the last remnant of the widely variant Judaeo-Italian languages spoken throughout Italy and Corfu and along the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea and the Ionian Sea. The language may have had some influence on the development of Yiddish.[4]

Judaeo-Latin is a hypothetical language covering a range of geographical and register varieties of Latin. It is postulated to have been spoken in specific Jewish communities of the Roman Empire. A small corpus of Latin texts from the Middle Ages written in the Hebrew alphabet exist, but they are insufficient to indicate a commonly spoken ethnodialect, and thus the existence of a veritable Jewish Latin language is pure conjecture.[5]

There exists two distinct varieties of Occitan language spoken by Jews.

Judaeo-Provençal was the language that developed in Provence and in the rest of medieval southern France. Judaeo-Occitan had several unique phonemic changes in Hebrew loanwords. Use of Judaeo-Provençal, as the use of Provençal, began to decline following the spread of French language in the southern parts of the country. This decline accelerated with the emancipation of the Jews in the wake of the French Revolution, which enabled French Jews to migrate and settle outside of Provence.[6]

Another Jewish variety of Occitan, Judeo-Gascon, was spoken in Gascony until the early 20th century.[7]

Judaeo-Piedmontese was a language spoken in Piedmont, in North Western Italy from around the 16th century to the Second World War. It was based on Piedmontese, a Gallo-Italian language close to Provençal, with many loanwords from Classical Hebrew. Italian author Primo Levi, born within the Piedmontese Jewish community, described the language briefly in the opening chapter of his book The Periodic Table.

Judeo-Portuguese was the language spoken by the secret Jewish population of Portugal until the 16th century when it was extinct. A few vestigial archaism forms survived in secret religious rituals through small, unique Crypto-Jewish communities in the Belmonte municipality.

Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino is known by a number of other names. It is found in many varied regional dialects and is the modern descendant of the Spanish that was spoken by the Sephardi Jews, the descendants of Spain's large and influential Jewish population. After the 1492 Alhambra Decree mandated the expulsion of Spain's Jewish population of 300,000, Judaeo-Spanish spread throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire, becoming the lingua franca of the Adriatic Sea. In 2017, it was formally recognised by the Royal Spanish Academy.[8]