[6]: 125 [7]: 35 Many significant Jewish works, including a number of religious writings by Saadia Gaon, Maimonides and Judah Halevi, were originally written in Judeo-Arabic, as this was the primary vernacular language of their authors.

Some of these Hebrew and Aramaic words may have passed into general usage, particularly in religion and culture, though this pre-Islamic Judeo-Arabic was not the basis of a literature.

[2] With the Early Muslim conquests, areas including Mesopotamia and the eastern and southern Mediterranean underwent Arabization, most rapidly in urban centers.

The muwaššaḥ, an Andalusi genre of strophic poetry, typically included kharjas, or closing lines often in a different language.

[8] This coincided with increased isolation of Jewish communities and involved greater influence of Hebrew and Aramaic features.

[6] The significant emigration of Judeo-Arabic speakers in the 1940s and 1950s to Israel, France, and North America has led to endangerment or near-extinction of the ethnolects.

[7]: 44 [17][15] There remain small populations of speakers in Morocco,[15] Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, the United States,[citation needed] and Israel.

[15] Cultural critic Ella Shohat notes that Jewish speakers of Arabic did not refer to their language as 'Judeo-Arabic' but simply as 'Arabic'.

[4] In the period of 'massive dislocation' from the late 1940s through the 1960s, Jewish speakers of Arabic in diaspora and their descendants gradually adopted the term 'Judeo-Arabic' and its equivalents in French and Hebrew.

[4] Shohat cites the first issue of the Israeli journal Pe'amim, which featured a "Scholars' Forum" (בימת חוקרים) on "The Jewish Languages – the Common, the Unique and the Problematic" (הלשונות היהודיות – המשותף, המיוחד והבעייתי)[18] with articles from Chaim Menachem Rabin "מה מייחד את הלשונות היהודיות" ('What Distinguishes the Jewish Languages')[19] and Yehoshua Blau "הערבית-היהודית הקלאסית" ('Classical Judeo-Arabic').

[20] This project explicitly sought to describe the Arabic of Jews as a distinct, Jewish language, equating it with Yiddish.

Particularly in its later forms, Judeo-Arabic contains distinctive features and elements of Hebrew and Aramaic, such as grammar, vocabulary, orthography, and style.