Ladino is a Jewish language spoken by as many as 60,000 people, primarily in Israel, and by diaspora communities in North America, France, Turkey, Greece, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ancestral language of many Sephardic Jewish communities, Ladino first emerged as a family of Judeo-Romance languages in Roman Iberia, having developed from Latin, Greek, and Judeo-Arabic origins. Following the ethnic cleansing of Jewish, Muslim Arab, and Muslim Berber communities from Spain in 1492, various Iberian Judeo-Romance languages were folded into the Ladino language that is still spoken today. Isaac is a contributor to our long-term Jewish languages project.

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More from Wikipedia: Judaeo-Spanish or Judeo-Spanish (autonym djudeoespanyol, Hebrew script: גﬞודﬞיאו־איספאנייול‎, Cyrillic: жудеоеспањол), called Ladino by some in recent times, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. Originally spoken in Spain and then after the Edict of Expulsion spreading through the then-Ottoman Empire (the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa) as well as France, Italy, the Netherlands, Morocco, and England, it is today spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most of the surviving speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, France, and Turkey. In 2017 it was formally recognized by the Royal Spanish Academy. The core vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is Old Spanish and it has numerous elements from all the old Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Old Aragonese, Astur-Leonese, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and Mozarabic. The language has been further enriched by Ottoman Turkish and Semitic vocabularies, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic — especially in the domains of religion, law, and spirituality — and most of the vocabulary for new and modern concepts has been adopted through French and Italian. Furthermore, the language is influenced to a lesser degree by other local languages of the Balkans, such as Greek, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. Historically, the Rashi script and its cursive form Solitreo have been the main orthographies for writing Judaeo-Spanish. However, today it is mainly written with the Latin alphabet, though some other alphabets such as Hebrew and Cyrillic are still in use. Judaeo-Spanish is known by many different names, mostly: Español (Espanyol, Spaniol, Spaniolish, Espanioliko), Judió (Judyo, Djudyo) or Jidió (Jidyo, Djidyo), Judesmo (Judezmo, Djudezmo), Sefaradhí (Sefaradi) or Ḥaketía (in North Africa). In Turkey and formerly in the Ottoman Empire, it has been traditionally called Yahudice in Turkish, meaning the Jewish language. In Israel, Hebrew speakers usually call the language Espanyolit, Spanyolit, or Ladino. Judaeo-Spanish, once the trade language of the Adriatic Sea, the Balkans, and the Middle-East and renowned for its rich literature especially in Salonika, today is under serious threat of extinction. Most native speakers are elderly, and the language is not transmitted to their children or grandchildren for various reasons. In some expatriate communities in Latin America and elsewhere, there is a threat of dialect leveling resulting in extinction by assimilation into modern Spanish. It is experiencing, however, a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music."

This video was recorded by Isaac Azouz over Zoom, thanks to coordination by Noah Usman. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. To download a copy, please contact hello@wikitongues.org.