Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community brings together scholars and activists from around the world, all of whom have participated in and presented original research at the annual ucLADINO ...Judeo-Spanish Symposia. This collection addresses a number of linguistic, historical, and cultural matters pertinent to the Sephardim in different lands from the fifteenth century to the present day. Essays in this volume reveal how Sephardim from various parts of the world - Turkey, the Balkans, Morocco, and the United States - culturally and linguistically position themselves among each other, among other Jews, and among their non-Jewish co-regionalists. Contributors explore how the rich history of the Sephardim has allowed for the development, maintenance, endangerment, and even revitalization of the Judeo-Spanish language(s).
The authors of this collection examine Palenque's linguistic, geographic, and cultural origins from interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse perspectives.
This study explores language ideologies among Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardim in Seattle (n = 22) and South Florida (n = 20). Speakers responded to a five-point Likert scale survey containing ...fifteen questions, which collected data about informants' use of Judeo-Spanish, metalinguistic awareness, and personal attitudes regarding contact with other languages. Some of the most significant between-group differences include feeling integrated into a community of Judeo-Spanish speakers, communicative proficiency in Modern Spanish, knowledge of which elements in Judeo-Spanish come from other languages, as well as evaluative statements concerning the use of Turkish and English throughout one's Judeo-Spanish. An examination of these groups and their individual members highlights the social structure of each population and demonstrates how such organization factors into the linguistic and ideological stance of each community.
•Sephardim in Seattle and South Florida continue to use Judeo-Spanish.•South Florida Sephardim report more metalinguistic awareness than those in Seattle.•South Florida Sephardim report greater proficiency in Modern Spanish than in Seattle.•Seattle Sephardim report more communal integration than those in South Florida.•Seattle Sephardim favor English code-switching more favorably than in South Florida.
This study explores contact between Ladino-speaking Sephardim and Spanish-speaking Latinos in New York City and Los Angeles, home to two of the largest factions of each population in the United ...States. While the retention of postalveolar sibilants ʒ, dʒ, ʃ in Ladino, corresponding to velar x in Spanish, helps distinguish these varieties, research has demonstrated cases where Sephardim implement the latter phone in lieu of one of the former. That such contact-induced change is a result of interaction between Sephardim and Latinos is further examined in this research. Twenty-five speakers of Ladino participated in two oral-production tasks: within-group and between-group testing. In the former, informants were paired with another speaker of Ladino; in the latter, they were paired with a speaker of Spanish. Data reveal that informants replace postalveolar sibilants with velar x at a rate of 18.2% within group and 76.5% between group, when direct equivalencies exist. Statistical analysis demonstrates that production of velar x, the dependent variable, is conditioned by several independent variables, both social (age, gender, city of residence, interlocutor) and linguistic (type of lexical correspondence and origin of lexicon). Subsequent discussion considers the role of accommodation in determining the ways in which speakers select and implement variation in their speech.
Sociolinguistics of Judeo‐Spanish Kirschen, Bryan
Language and linguistics compass,
March 2018, 2018-03-00, Volume:
12, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this paper, I address sociolinguistic concerns related to the Judeo‐Spanish language from prior to the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497) until the present day. ...After discussing relevant sociolinguistic models pre‐ and post‐expulsion in order to account for variation across Judeo‐Spanish speech communities worldwide, I discuss the current ethnolinguistic vitality of the language as well as the domains of use whereby speakers continue to utilize their heritage language. I then discuss sociolinguistic variation, noting variables that may condition elements of speech, supported by synchronic and diachronic studies related to the language. Given such factors, I examine two major contact situations: that of code‐switching across communities as well as contact with non‐Sephardic (“Modern”) varieties of Spanish. I conclude by offering ways in which students and scholars of the language can advance Judeo‐Spanish sociolinguistics as a field, including a discussion of current research methodologies and other key considerations of the 21st century.
Abstract
This study analyzes discourse in and about Spanish by presidential hopefuls and their prospective running mates
leading up to the 2016 United States presidential election. I utilize
Irvine ...and Gal’s
(2000)
framework of semiotic processes to reveal how Democratic and Republican politicians implement iconization,
fractal recursivity, and erasure in order to appeal to their respective bases. Further, I demonstrate how discourse in and about
Spanish may be considered marked to one party and unmarked to another. Analysis is based on a 70-item corpus consisting of
broadcasted and printed media, as well as content promulgated over social media during this election cycle. In analyzing key
discursive moments that focus on “language”, I address national ideologies as well as
latinidad
and its
appropriation. As such, this study contributes to an understanding of the role of Spanish and the Latino electorate within the
United States.
I Love Lucy is considered to have been one of the most humorous television programs in the United States as early as the 1950s. This paper explores the use of language by the protagonists, Lucy and ...Ricky Ricardo, in order to understand the source of the program's humor. Linguistic analysis of the Ricardos' speech is applied, and ideological implications are explored, in an attempt to explain how the humor of the program is acceptable to both English and Spanish speakers. Lucy and Ricky execute multilingual manipulation with one another in such a way that linguistically charged statements throughout the series do not insult viewers, and such interaction may be considered humorous for English and Spanish speakers alike. The question of why it is justifiable to laugh at such multilingual humor is explored by analyzing the frameworks of linguistic manipulation utilized by each of the Ricardos.
The United States experienced an influx of Sephardim from Turkey and the Balkans from the end of the nineteenth century until the end of the first quarter of the twentieth. Aviva Ben-Ur estimates ...that as many as sixty-thousand Sephardic Jews entered the United States during this period, the majority remaining in New York City (“‘We Speak and Write This Language Against Our Will’” 131 and 140 n. 2). With the ever-increasing number of Sephardim to arrive in the country at the start of the twentieth century, correspondence between major Sephardic cities became apparent. This is, in part, due to the
For the past century, Los Angeles and New York City have been home to two of the largest Latino and Sephardic populations in the United States. Interaction between these ethnic groups, therefore, has ...been inevitable. However, there has been minimal research on the linguistic repercussions that have resulted from contact between these two linguistically similar yet distinct groups. From a sociolinguistic agenda, I explore how Judeo-Spanish speakers in these two metropolises utilize their language and in which domains. Furthermore, my research reveals that, among my informants (n=25), Judeo-Spanish is used as a platform to acquire proficiency in varieties of Modern Spanish. Aside from conducting sociolinguistic interviews to account for the diglossic distribution among informants, I carry out production as well as perception experiments. These experiments determine which features typically associated with a given variety of language are prone to transference. For the production experiment, informants engaged in conversation with a native speaker of Spanish from either Los Angeles or New York City, representing different varieties of Spanish (Los Angeles Vernacular Spanish and Dominican Spanish, respectively). After reviewing the type of speech produced by the informants, results indicate that informants utilize prepalatals d3, 3, and f instead of velar x approximately one-third of the time. For the perception experiment, informants listened to real and nonce words in Judeo-Spanish and Modern Spanish and were asked to identify to which language each token pertained or was more likely to pertain. This experiment reveals that, although phonological differences assist the informants in making categorical selections, lexicalization remains the most important property for such categorization. The results of the perception experiment offer insight as to some of the phenomena occurring in the speech production of the informants. Collectively, the results from these experiments reveal how Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardim utilize their language. Exploring theories of diglossia and accommodation demonstrate how informants position themselves in front of another speaker of Judeo-Spanish or Modern Spanish. As informants are often metalinguistically cognizant of the source languages of Judeo-Spanish, lexicalization allows them to determine which features to transfer between languages.
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