Judeo-Arabic

Also known as Judeo-Arabic languages, Judeo-Arabic dialects, Judeo Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic

Key facts

Language.name: Judeo-Arabic
Language.image: File:Cairo Genizah Fragment.jpg
Language.imagecaption: A page from the Cairo Geniza, part of which is written in the Judeo-Arabic language
Language.ethnicity: Jews from North Africa and the Fertile Crescent
Language.date: 2022
Language.familycolor: Afro-Asiatic
Language.fam2: Semitic
Language.fam3: West Semitic
Language.fam4: Central Semitic
Language.fam5: Arabic
Language.ancestor: Old Arabic
Language.ancestor2: Classical Arabic
Language.script: Hebrew alphabet
Language.iso2: jrb
Language.iso3: jrb
Language.lc1: yhd
Language.ld1: Judeo-Egyptian Arabic
Language.lc2: aju

via Wikipedia infobox

~19 min read

Encyclopedic overview

12 sections

Contents

History
Present day
Historiography
Characteristics
Dialects
Media
Orthography
Sample text
See also
Endnotes
Bibliography
External links

Judeo-Arabic (; ; ), sometimes referred to as Sharh in its high-level translation calque, is a group of related ethnolects or religiolects within the branches of the Arabic language used by Jewish communities. Judeo-Arabic is a mixed form of Arabic, in its formal and vernacular varieties, as it has been used by Jews, and refers to both written forms and spoken dialects. Although Jewish dialectical forms of Arabic, which predate Islam, have been distinct from those of other religious communities, they are not a uniform linguistic entity.

Varieties of Arabic formerly spoken by Jews throughout the Arab world have been, in modern times, classified as distinct ethnolects. Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, encompassing four languages: Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju), Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (jye), Judeo-Egyptian Arabic (yhd), and Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (yud).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Judeo-Arabic” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.