Jewish languages
[2] Hebrew as a separate language developed during the latter half of the second millennium BCE between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, an area known as Canaan.
Jews have often had limited exposure to non-Jewish society for various reasons, including imposed ghettoization (whether self-imposed separation or the forced creation of the ghetto by the host city) and strict endogamy, and as a result, Jewish languages diverged and developed separately from non-Jewish varieties in the territories they settled in.
These languages, unless they already have an accepted name (i.e. Yiddish, Ladino), are prefixed with "Judeo" (e.g. Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Aramaic, Judeo-Marathi, Judeo-Malayalam, etc).
Even so, the majority of Jews in Eurasia and Africa, and many immigrants in North America and Palestine, still spoke Jewish languages.
Due to continued liturgical and literary use of Hebrew and Aramaic, Jewish communities were naturally in a state of diglossia.
[14] Along with their vernacular Jewish language, most Jews could read and write in Hebrew, which was necessary to fulfill the religious commandment to learn Torah and teach it.
Jews were expected to also have knowledge of Judeo-Aramaic, the language of religious commentary (targumim) as well as many prayers, including the Kaddish.
In some cases, as with Judeo-Spanish, a register may be developed for Biblical translation and exegesis in which Hebrew-Aramaic patterns are frequently calqued, though the number of true Hebrew and/or Aramaic loanwords may be low.
Another possibility is that Jews may speak the same language as their non-Jewish neighbors, but occasionally insert Hebrew-Aramaic or other Jewish elements.
Judeo-Papiamento, the only living Jewish ethnolect endemic to the Americas and likely the only one that is also a creole language, has lexical differences from its non-Jewish counterpart that go beyond the influence of Hebrew and Aramaic.
Yiddish is the Judeo-German language developed by Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Central and Eastern Europe before World War II.
[16][17] Many ancient and distinct Jewish languages, including Judeo-Georgian, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Berber, Krymchak, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Malayalam have largely fallen out of use due to the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish exodus from Arab lands, the assimilation policies of Israel in its early days and other factors.
[19] Kol Yisrael, Israel's former public-service broadcaster, had long maintained short daily news and featured programming in many Jewish languages and dialects.
In addition, for over two decades starting in the late 1970s, a daily 30-minute shortwave transmission was made to Yemen in Judeo-Yemeni Arabic.
Radio Exterior de España, Spain's international public broadcaster, provides programming in Judeo-Spanish, which they refer to as Sefardi.
The usual course of development for these languages was through the addition of Hebrew words and phrases used to express uniquely Jewish concepts and concerns.
