13 Facts About Jewish languages

Jewish languages are the various languages and dialects that developed in Jewish communities in the diaspora.

The original Jewish languages language is Hebrew, supplanted as the primary vernacular by Aramaic following the Babylonian exile.

Jewish languages communities were dispersed around the world in the diaspora which followed the Jewish languages-Roman wars.

Jews have often had limited exposure to non-Jewish society for various reasons, including imposed ghettoization and strict endogamy, and as a result, Jewish languages diverged and developed separately from non-Jewish varieties in the territories they settled in.

Jewish languages belong to a variety of genealogical language families, but these languages have common characteristics, making their study a distinct field of comparative linguistics known as Jewish linguistics.

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The common feature between the Jewish languages is the presence of Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic lexical components, stemming from the shared use of these languages in writing and liturgy.

Jewish languages are generally defined as the unique linguistic varieties of Jewish communities in the diaspora in their contact with surrounding non-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.

For example, what is today known as Baghdad Jewish languages Arabic 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.

Judeo-Catalan, was the Jewish languages language spoken by the Jewish languages communities in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands.

Many ancient and distinct Jewish languages, including Judaeo-Georgian, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Berber, Krymchak, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Malayalam have largely fallen out of use due to the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish exodus from Arab lands, the assimilation policies of Israel in its early days and other factors.

Yiddish, as well as several other Jewish languages, has contributed to the vocabulary of coterritorial non-Jewish languages, such as English or French.