| Judeo-Gascon | |
|---|---|
| Region | Bordeaux,Bayonne, South ofLandes |
| Ethnicity | Spanish and Portuguese Jews |
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
Judeo-Gascon is asociolect of theGascon language, formerly spoken among theSpanish and Portuguese Jews who settled during the 16th century in the cities ofBordeaux,Bayonne and in the south-west part ofLandes of Gascony (most notably inPeyrehorade andBidache).Judeo-Gascon, asJudeo-Provençal, the other majorJewish sociolect ofOccitan, is now practically extinct.
Until recently, Judeo-Gascon was probably one of the least known dialects of Gascon andOccitan and the least studied from a linguistic point of view. Its first coverage in scholarship has been inNahon (2017); its linguistic characteristics have been investigated in depth inNahon (2018), alongside comprehensive critical editions of the surviving Judeo-Gascon texts.
After theexpulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, some Iberian Jews, who were originally speakers of Portuguese and/or Spanish, settled in the South-West of France in Gascon-speaking areas. In the course of time, these Jews were linguistically assimilated to their Gascon-speaking environment, though Spanish was kept, alongside Hebrew, as a written language for administrative, liturgical, and literary purposes.
The variety of Gascon spoken by the Jews, in a situation of diglossia with these languages, received a strong linguistic imprint that caused it to diverge from the Gascon dialects spoken by the coterritorial Christian populations. Additional influences ofJudeo-Italian,Judeo-Provençal andWestern Yiddish occurred too, due to immigration of Jews from other communities to Gascony.[1]
Judeo-Gascon was still spoken in the early 20th century but disappeared quickly after theSecond World War.[2]
It was superseded by a variety of French that retains a large number of lexical and morphological influences from Judeo-Gascon.[3] This variety of French with Judeo-Gascon substrate is still spoken nowadays by a few dozens of speakers, some of which still know a few sentences in Judeo-Gascon.[4]
The main phonetic feature of Judeo-Gascon, especially its Bayonne variety, is the realization as [e] of stressed and unstressed /e/, in contrast with its [œ] realization in the surroundingWestern Gascon (also calledgascon negue). This has been attributed by Nahon as an influence from the inland dialects ordiglossia with Spanish.[5]
The most prominent feature of Judeo-Gascon is the high influx of loanwords fromHebrew,Spanish andPortuguese, adapted to the phonology of Gascon.
Hebrew loanwords includecheman Israël 'goodness!' (Hebr.šema yisrael),haroche orharocho ‘disgusting, unpleasant’ (Hebr.ḥarosetcharoset),vécimento ‘blessed!’ (Hebr.besiman ṭob ‘in a good omen’),sabbat ‘Saturday’ (Hebr.šabbat). Ibero-Romance loanwords includeenridou ‘tangle’ (Sp./Port.enredo),bobou ‘stupid’,amoundeguille 'meat ball' (Sp.albondiguilla), and many others.[6]
Most texts written in Judeo-Gascon date from the 19th and early 20th century. The only known earlier material are a few 18th-century Gascon nicknames borne by Jews in Gascony.[7] All the other documents have been published and commented by Nahon. They include: