Rather these dialects have been maintained or are facing critical endangerment within respective Judeo-Iraqi diasporas, namely those of Israel and the United States.
This peculiarity goes back centuries: in medieval Iraqi Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts the letters ra and ghayn are frequently interchanged.
The Jews of Baghdad are a largely indigenous population and they also preserve the pre-Mongol invasion dialect of Baghdad in its Jewish form, which is similar but a bit different from the general pre-Mongol Baghdadi dialect due to the linguistic influences of Hebrew and Judeo-Babylonian Aramaic, instead of the general Babylonian Aramaic that existed before the Islamic invasion.
As with other respective religious and ethnic communities coexisting in Baghdad, the Jewish community had spoken as well as written almost exclusively in their distinctive dialect, largely drawing their linguistic influences from Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic languages as well as from languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Persian, and Turkic.
With waves of persecution and thus emigration, the dialect has been carried to and until recently used within respective Judeo-Iraqi diaspora communities, spanning Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manchester and numerous other international urban hubs.
With successive generations being born and raised in Israel, it is mainly the older people who still actively or passively speak Judeo-Baghdadi and other forms of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic.
[4] There is a sizeable published religious literature in the language, including several Bible translations and the Qanūn an-nisā' (قانون النساء) of the hakham Yosef Hayyim.
The following method of describing the letters of the Hebrew alphabet was used by teachers in Baghdad until quite recently:[5] JB is relatively conservative in preserving Classical Arabic phonemes.
There are many instances where this alternation leads to a subtle change in meaning, e.g. faġġ 'he poured, served food' vs. farr 'he threw'.