Judeo-Spanish: the Spanish of the exiles

El judeoespañol (ladino, judezmo)

1492–. In 1492 the Catholic Monarchs ordered the Jews of Spain to convert or leave.

What happened

In 1492 the Catholic Monarchs ordered the Jews of Spain to convert or leave. Those who left took their Spanish with them, mainly to the Ottoman Empire (Salonika, Istanbul, the Balkans) and to North Africa, where the variety is called haketía. Cut off from Spain, this speech grew into Judeo-Spanish, also called ladino or judezmo: it kept features of 15th-century Castilian and Andalusian speech and took words from Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, French and Italian. Salonika became its capital; between 1870 and 1930 some 260,000 to 400,000 Sephardim lived in Eastern Europe and about 300 publications appeared in the language. The Holocaust destroyed the Balkan communities (55,000 Jews of Salonika were murdered), and emigration scattered the rest. Today it is spoken mostly by the elderly; one estimate for Israel is 100,000 speakers. Courses, radio, the magazine Aki Yerushalaim (since 1979) and Israel's Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino work to keep it alive.

Read about it

• Los sefardíes y el ladino — The Sephardim and Ladino

Connected

• The fall of Granada (2 January 1492)
• The expulsion of the Jews (31 March 1492)
• The expulsion of the Jews (31 March 1492)

Sources

1. La enseñanza del español en Israel: el español sefardí o ladino (Anuario 2003, I. Lerner y B. Katz) — Centro Virtual Cervantes
2. El legado de Sefarad: Los sefardíes de los Balcanes (1 de 3) — Centro Virtual Cervantes