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| Judeo-Malayalam | |
|---|---|
| യെഹൂദ്യമലയാളം (yehūdyamalayāḷaṃ) | |
| Native to | Kerala,Israel |
| Ethnicity | Cochin Jews |
Native speakers | 8,000 (2009)[1] |
| Koleluttu script (Malayalam alphabet) Hebrew alphabet | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | jewi1241 Jewish Malayalam |
 | |
Judeo-Malayalam (Malayalam:യെഹൂദ്യമലയാളം,yehūdyamalayāḷaṃ; Hebrew:מלאיאלאם יהודית,malayalam yəhūḏīṯ) is the traditional language of theCochin Jews (also called Malabar Jews), fromKerala, in southernIndia, spoken today by a few dozen people inIsrael and by fewer than 25 people in India.
Judeo-Malayalam is the only knownDravidianJewish language. (There is another Dravidian language spoken regularly by a Jewish community,Telugu. Spoken by the small and only very newly observant Jewish community of east-centralAndhra Pradesh, because of the long period in which the people were not practicing Judaism, they did not develop any distinctly identifiable Judeo-Telugu language or the dialect.See main article:Telugu Jews.)
Since it does not differ substantially ingrammar orsyntax from other colloquialMalayalam dialects, it is not considered by many linguists to be alanguage in its own right, but rather adialect, or simply a language variation. Judeo-Malayalam shares common features with other Jewish languages likeLadino,Judeo-Arabic andYiddish. For example, verbatim translations from Hebrew to Malayalam, archaic features of Old Malayalam, Hebrew components agglutinated to Dravidian verb and noun formations and special idiomatic usages based on its Hebrew loanwords. Due to the lack of long-term scholarship on this language variation, there is no separate designation for the language (if it can be so considered), for it to have its own language code (see alsoSIL andISO 639).
Unlike manyJewish languages, Judeo-Malayalam is not written using theHebrew alphabet. It does, however, like most Jewish languages, contain manyHebrewloanwords, which are regularly transliterated, as much as possible, using theMalayalam script. Like many other Jewish languages, Judeo-Malayalam also contains a number oflexical,phonological andsyntactic archaisms, in this case, from the days before Malayalam became fully distinguished fromTamil.
In spite of claims by someParadesi Jews that their ancestors'Ladino influenced the development of Judeo-Malayalam, so far no such influence, not even on the superficial lexical level, is found. There is, however, affiliation withMappila Malayalam, especially of North Malabar, in words such askhabar orkhabura (grave), and formations such asmayyattŭ āyi (മയ്യത്ത് ആയി) used by Muslims andśālōṃ āyi (ശാലോം ആയി) used by Jews fordied (മരിച്ചു പോയി,mariccu pōyi in standard Malayalam). As with the parent language, Judeo-Malayalam also contains loanwords fromSanskrit and Pali as a result of the long-term affiliation of Malayalam, like all the other Dravidian languages, with Pali and Sanskrit through sacred and secular Buddhist and Hindu texts.
Because the vast majority of scholarship regarding the Cochin Jews has concentrated on the ethnographic accounts in English provided byParadesi Jews (sometimes also calledWhite Jews), who immigrated to Kerala from Europe in the sixteenth century and later, the study of the status and role of Judeo-Malayalam has suffered neglect. Since their emigration to Israel, Cochin Jewish immigrants have participated in documenting and studying the last speakers of Judeo-Malayalam, mostly in Israel. In 2009, a documentation project was launched under the auspices of theBen-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem. Digital copies can be obtained for any scholar who wishes to study Judeo-Malayalam.
Over the centuries,Malayalam borrowed Hebrew words. A few of them are given below:
| Original Hebrew | Malayalam derivative | Meaning | Notes[5] |
|---|---|---|---|
| ner tamid (נר תמיד) | ner tamid | the "Eternal Light" | from the cognate (נר תמיד) |
| Nāṣrani | Nasrani | Follower ofNazarene tradition | Original term for the Nazarene sect at Qumran |
| Bimah (בּימה), | Bema | Altar | from the cognate Bima |
| Tamar (Hebrew:תָּמָר) | Tamara | Upright beauty | from the cognate Tmr (Hebrew:תָּמָר) "Date Palm" ( of Upright Beauty), as described inSong of Songs chapter 7. Implies Stature (Posture) and upright beauty. implying upright and resilient plant in adverse environment. Like (upright Date Palm in the hostile desert) and (upright Lotus in murky water (malayalam)). Similar characteristics of resilience across diverse environments. |
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