That title sounds a bit like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. It’s a real language, spoken by some 240,000 Jews throughout the Arab world. For a quick intro, see the Wikipedia article, but I first want to make a few comments here, with a couple of other links.

You probably are wondering whether Judeo-Arabic is merely a dialect of Arabic spoken among Jews. And that is more-or-less true, although we should really call it an ethnolect, not a dialect. Actually — and no one should be surprised by this — the situation is more complicated than that. As the Wikipedia article about it points out:

Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, encompassing four languages: Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju), Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (jye), Judeo-Egyptian Arabic (yhd), and Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (yud)…. Judeo-Arabic is a blend of Arabic, Arabic dialects, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Later forms of Judeo-Arabic particularly express Hebrew and Aramaic elements.

That’s clear enough, right?

Well, maybe not.

To humanize the situation, you are hereby given a short two-part assignment: first read this article in the Forward. (Yes, the Forward still exists!) Then read this paragraph about Judeo-Arabic from Subtitle, one of my favorite linguistics podcasts:

When Israeli Dan Sheena told his Iraqi Jewish family that he wanted to start teaching the language they spoke at home, Judeo-Arabic, they said no one would want to learn it. But he soon proved them wrong, racking up more than 100,000 followers on TikTok, where he shares videos about the language. Judeo-Arabic dialects were once spoken throughout the Arab world, but during the 20th century, its speakers migrated en masse to Israel, Europe, and North America. Dan is something of an anomaly—most families did not pass the language down after arriving in their new countries. “We wanted to be British,” says Vicky Sweiry Tsur, who grew up in the UK in a Bahraini Jewish family. “I used to feel very embarrassed when my friends heard my parents speak Arabic.” Through his social media presence, Dan has drawn followers and students like Vicky from all over the world who have never had the opportunity to learn Judeo-Arabic before. “This is the way to talk about Judeo-Arabic, to keep it alive,” Dan says. “Social media lets me do that.”

Categories: Linguistics