Haketia, Judeo-Spanish et al.

[Judith Cohen]

Hello, re:

> Now, if you consider Haketia (Moroccan Judeo-Spanish) to be a separate
> language than Judeo-Spanish, then there is also an online community on
> Facebook (Haketía Entre Mozotros). Haketia uses different graphemes, and
> utilizes Moroccan Arabic as a lexifier rather than Turkish in
> Judeo-Spanish.
I think that's a pretty big "if."

First of all: who decides whether something is a separate language? Do
scholars get to "decide" that? Does it matter what the - largely highly
educated - speakers of the language say?

Judeo-Spanish is not even really a language - it's an umbrella term
constructed to include the various names of the varities of old
peninsular romance languages mixed with Hebrew and local languages
(Turkish, Greek, Slavic languages, Moroccan Arabic; later on Italian,
French, some English) and with what Haim Vidal Séphiha calls
"Judeo-espagnol calque", - Ladino, the direct, word by word translation
from Hebrew, used mostly for religious and para-religious texts. The
most commonly given example is from the Haggada "la noche la esta"
(ha-laila ha-zeh), in religious texts, while "esta noche" is the way it
is used in daily language.

So haketia is not "a separate language [from] Judeo-Spanish - it's a
KIND of Judeo-Spanish.

Years ago, the pioneer listserv Ladinokomunita basically excluded
haketia - because the founding members didn't know much about it and
thought it was mostly Arabic and not comprehensible to them. Once they
realized that it was the same language, with loan words from Moroccan
Arabic rather than from Greek, Turkish or Slavic languages, they
welcomed it. Haketia groups which insist on being separate do this
largely because of years of rejection through misunderstanding.

In fact, by your logic, Judeo-Spanish with loan words from Greek should
be a different language from Bosnian Judeo-Spanish or Bulgarian
Judeo-Spanish or Turkish Judeo-Spanish.They should each be different
languages if the language of many loan words defines "a separate
language." As for different graphemes - there actually is no one
accepted way of writing any type of Judeo-Spanish. This is the subject
of many arguments, and I don't see how it can be used to mark any one
aspect of Judeo-Spanish as "separate."

Judeo-Spanish is an umbrella term which includes Ladino (in all its
uses, both academic and colloquial - the latter used in a general sense,
almost like "Judeo-Spanish"), Dzhudezmo, Dzhidio, Spaniol, Haketia and
other more localized terms, including, somethimes, "zhargon".

I am not trained as a linguist. But as a trained ethnomusicologist with
over three decades of (still ongoing) fieldwork in many different
Sephardic communities, as well as a frequent performer of both the
Moroccan and Eastern Mediterranean repertoires, as well as in non-Jewish
communities where minority languages (Ibizan Catalan, Extremaduran
Spanish....) are spoken, I often come across people who are frustrated
by scholars telling them what it is they speak.

Judith

[Rey Romero]

Correct. Speakers get to decide what they speak and how to call it. Their reasons can ran the gamma from practical to sociopolitical to geographical to historical. And there can be no consensus, or older consensus irrelevant to modern times, or a shifting consensus. We linguists, we merely observe. Therefore, although Galician, Mirandes, and Portuguese look very much to be lects of one macrolect (and the same could be said of Catalan, Balearic, Valencian, and Algharese), speakers from those communities have chosen different names for their varieties. For instance, there is now a conscious effort to call Valencian "Valencian" but in previous decades there was an effort to label it as Catalan (or a dialect of such). The same can be said of Ladino. For many years, thanks to the efforts of Prof. Sephiha, we had the distinction of written (Ladino) vs. vernacular (Judeo-Spanish), but it seems that now that distinction is changing and Ladino and Judeo-Spanish is being used interchangeably. Haketia may or may not be considered a dialect of Judeo-Spanish. Ultimately, endonyms are up for the community to decide, how they see themselves and how they see the language. But, if I may explain, there are several factors of how Haketia is different from the Eastern block of Judeo-Spanish varieties: 1) it developed outside the Ottoman Empire, therefore it lacks a lot of the common Ottoman Turkish lexicon present in the East both in Judeo-Spanish varieties and in Balkan languages; 2) it has an additional Moroccan Arabic adstratum, that would increase lexical variation among East and Moroccan Judeo-Spanish varieties, 3) it underwent additional phonological changes such as the loss of Old Spanish palatal fricatives, the inclusion of Arabic fricatives (such as the pharyngeal one),  and 4) contact and proximity with the Iberian Peninsula introduced lexical items and even a Haketia/Castilian diglossia not present in the Eastern varieties of Judeo-Spanish. Furthermore, modern efforts to revitalize Haketia call it as such, including the "Voces de Haketia" and the book "Haketia: a memoir of Judeo-Spansih language in Morocco" although with the additional explanation that it is Judeo-Spanish from Morocco. I recently read a dissertation analyzing the  Haketia spoken in the Brazilian Amazon. So, it can go either way. Members of the community can decide whether to emphasize its distinctiveness or its similarities with the other Judeo-Spanish and call it as they see fit. In a way, Haketia can take the road of Portuguese, which is a dialect of Galician, and call itself a label distinct than its macrolect. Or, it can take the road of Brazilian Portuguese, so different from European Portuguese (phonologically, lexically, and even morphologically!), but Portuguese nonetheless.
As far as graphemes, I think it does make a difference for online communities. Literacy in a writing system may include or exclude online community members, thereby directly affecting the online community membership. The additional graphemes in Haketia may not be enough to include or exclude other speakers of Judeo-Spanish from its online communities (and vice versa!), but consider other cases, such as online communities and forums in Judeo-Spanish based in Israel that use the Hebrew script, that could not be easily accessible to Sephardim who speak the language in Turkey, Europe, and the Americas, where literacy in alef-bet may be less advanced.