Judeo-Malayalam

According to tradition and available records, Jews have been in Kerala, one of the southern states in the Republic of India, since at least the beginning of the common era. The Kerala community is distinct from the Bene Israel Jews, centered in Mumbai, Calcutta, and other cities in central and northern India. In the 1940s there were about 2500 Malayalam-speaking Jews in India, and after 1948 most of them migrated to Israel. Today there are only a handful of Jews left in Kerala, but the Jewish Malayalam language is maintained by many of the immigrants to Israel, most of them elderly. Malayalam is the official language of Kerala. About 30 million people use this language in everyday life, and it has a vibrant literature. About three million copies of Malayalam newspapers are printed every day, and Malayalam programs are aired on six radio stations and five television channels. While the majority of Malayalam speakers are Hindu, several religious minority groups speak distinct varieties. ​ Manuscripts of Pirkei Avot, Song of Songs, Eicha, and other texts in Hebrew and Jewish Malayalam. There are three main components of JMFS: Dravidian (Malayalam and Tamil), Sanskrit, and Hebrew. In addition, there is a sprinkling of influence from other Jewish languages, such as Ladino. The core of the linguistic substance is Dravidian, similar to contemporary Malayalam. One of the most notable features of Jewish Malayalam is the presence of fossilized elements from the pre-Malayalam layer. These archaisms exist at several levels, including lexicon, morphology, phonology, and semantics. A semantic example can be found in one of the wedding songs: the bride is described as covering her head with three types of flowers that have NaRRam. The word NaRRam exists in contemporary Tamil, Malayalam, and other local languages with the meaning 'bad smell'. However, in this case the word is used with its old Tamil sense: 'good smell'. This is just one example of the many elements of Jewish Malayalam that may seem like contemporary Tamil borrowings but are actually archaic remnants from before Malayalam split off from Tamil. Another significant feature is the abundance of archaic Dravidian derivatives to denote Jewish concepts. The best examples are names for God, many of which are loan translations from Hebrew. Jews, Muslims, and Christians share the most popular form Thampuran 'Lord'. Jews and Muslims share Padachavan 'creator'. But Mulamudayon 'the one at the beginning', Oruvanayavan 'the only one', Sadakan 'the doer', Adimulamvayavan 'the one who is the root cause', and Adiperiyon 'the great beginner' are words for God used only by Jews. The typical Jewish concept of redemption is expressed by a special word coined from a Dravidian root "mil," according to well-accepted morphological rules: Milcha 'redemption' and Mirchakaran 'redeemer' are frequently found in JMFS but are non-existent in general Malayalam. JMFS are full of variants of these two Malayalam words, sometimes altered beyond recognition. Because of the frequency of archaisms, an ordinary Malayalam speaker would be bewildered by the opaqueness of JMFS. Even the women who still sing these songs today may not understand some of the words they use. But the linguistic archaisms – as well as biblical allusions – contribute to the speakers' sense of ethno-religious distinctiveness. Like Jewish languages around the world, Jewish Malayalam includes a number of Hebrew words and idioms, such as tora ('Torah'), shalom ('peace'), shir ('song'), and aliya ('ascension') . In a few instances Hebrew words appear as part of Malayalam compounds, such as alam padacavanthe 'world-created-he' and shalom ayi 'died' (lit. 'entered the state of peace'). Using only the JMFS corpus as data, it is difficult to determine how Jewish Malayalam differs phonologically from its non-Jewish correlate. It is written in Malayalam script , and the notebooks vary significantly in the graphemic representations of phonemes an