Judaeo-Arabic

Judaeo-Arabic is a religiolect spoken and written for the most part by Jews on Jewish topics and for a Jewish readership. Judaeo (or Middle) Arabic was probably spoken as early as the 7th century, and its written form goes back to the 10th/11th centuries (no Jewish literary works composed in Arabic prior to the ninth century have been preserved). It is common to divide the history of Judaeo-Arabic into five main periods: Pre-Islamic Judaeo-Arabic, Early Judaeo-Arabic (8th to 9th centuries), Classical Judaeo-Arabic (10th to 15th centuries), Later Judaeo-Arabic (15th to 19th centuries) and Modern Judaeo-Arabic (20th century). In general, texts from these periods exhibit many more dialectal elements than attested in earlier periods. According to B. Hary, one of leading experts of Judaeo-Arabic, Later Judaeo-Arabic saw the writing of texts (mostly religious) aimed at the general public and not only the elite. Towards the end of the 19th century and during the initial period of Modern Judaeo-Arabic, a process of extensive collecting of folk tales and other types of popular literature emerged, as well as the tradition of the šarḥ, which is the translation of Hebrew sacred texts into Judaeo-Arabic. There are several major features peculiar to Judaeo-Arabic texts, which exhibit their uniqueness on the one hand and their Jewishness on the other: it is typically written in Hebrew letters, and since the Arabic alphabet is larger than the Hebrew one, additional diacritic marks are added to some Hebrew letters when rendering Arabic consonants that are lacking in the Hebrew alphabet (Judaeo- Arabic authors often use different letters and diacritic marks to represent the same Arabic consonant. For instance, some authors use ג (Hebrew gimel) to representج (Arabic jim) and גֹ to represent غ(ghayn), while others reverse the two. This inconsistency increases the level of ambiguity of a given word, making the reading of Judeo-Arabic texts a challenging task even for an Arabic speaker. For instance, the letter י (Hebrew yod) sometimes represents the letterي   (ya)); and the frequent occurrence of Hebrew and Aramaic words and phrases, scattered among the Arabic text.

Whatever the amount of Hebrew words and phrases, they do not, however modify the main structure of Judaeo-Arabic: with some rare cases, the Hebrew words are infiltrated into the patterns of Arabic to the degree that they almost entirely are adapted to its structure. Consequently, where the ratio of Hebrew elements is high, Judaeo-Arabic texts can be considered as treatises written in Arabic containing Hebrew phrases. The degree of Hebrew component is determined by the personal style of the author, upon the literary genre (texts belonging to the realm of religious studies and addressed to a public versed in religious literature contain high percentage of Hebrew words, phrases, and sentences), and upon the presupposed Hebrew as well as Aramaic knowledge of the intended audience. Thus, the use of Hebrew script and the occurrence of Hebrew words and phrases are the external distinguishing marks of Judaeo-Arabic, the intrinsic character of which is revealed in its appeal to Jewish communities and use of Jewish topics. In addition to these features, Judaeo-Arabic texts contain a mixture of elements of Classical and post-Classical Arabic, dialectal components, pseudocorrections, and pseudocorrections that have become standardized. It also possesses a number of specific additional sociolinguistic and sociocultural features that set it apart.

Judaeo-Arabic is then the crossroad of Classical Arabic, Arabic dialects, Hebrew and Aramaic. This very peculiar composition of linguistic elements places Judaeo-Arabic in a special position to examine sociolinguistic features such as continuglossia, language continuum, code-mixing, and code-switching, registers and style, and language or dialects in contact.