Jewish languages

As a Jewish languages ​​are called historical and modern languages ​​, which are dominated by speakers, the ethnic and / or religious see themselves as Jews, native-speaking and doing more or less differ from non-Jewish languages ​​or language variants. It involves some very different languages ​​, not a language family.

Characteristics

It can be analytically three groups of Jewish languages ​​differ:

• Languages ​​that are clearly associated with Judaism and used by Jews (old and modern Hebrew, Yiddish ).
• Languages ​​that are more or less different and provided with specific Jewish linguistic features variants of languages, which are also used by non-Jews, with mutual intelligibility is largely given (eg, Ladino, Knaanisch, Jewish Aramaic versions of ( historical ), Arabic, French, Italian, Czech, etc )
• Finally, in a broader sense can be almost all major languages, especially (but not exclusively ) those of European origin, also be described as Jewish languages ​​as native language and often completely assimilated Jewish minorities are spread worldwide. In this sense, English is also known as the Jewish language largest today; Russian, Polish and German are common among Jews in Israel and the United States.

The preamble Jewish languages ​​does not refer to " language family " of genetically related to each other individual languages ​​, but is more of a socio-linguistic catch-all term. Also, the above-mentioned groups can not clean diffuse. For example, the Ladino as a variant of Castilian Spanish for Spaniards would be quite understandable; However, it has survived for historical reasons mainly in the Balkans, North Africa, Israel and Turkey, where the non - Jewish population does not speak Romance languages ​​, and is only through this linguistic isolation " typically Jewish ".

This applies analogously to the right into the second half of the 20th century largest Jewish language, Yiddish; originally a variant of Middle High German, it was only by the linguistic isolation of its speakers in the Slavic- speaking environment in Eastern Europe and later the anglophone to a typical hallmark of Jewish culture. A common feature of all Jewish languages ​​is the presence of a more or less extensive special vocabulary mostly Hebrew origin primarily (but not exclusively ) from the religious sector, the use of the Hebrew alphabet (with restrictions - for example, the Ladino was usually written with Latin letters) and the provisions of orthographic rules from the Talmudic period.