Italian Hebrew or Italki Hebrew refers to the pronunciation system for liturgical Hebrew traditionally used by Italian Jews.
The Italian pronunciation of Hebrew is similar to that of conservative Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Distinguishing features are:
This pronunciation has in many cases been adopted by the Sephardi, Ashkenazi and Appam communities of Italy as well as by the Italian rite communities.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
Modern Hebrew has 25 to 27 consonants and 5 vowels, depending on the speaker and the analysis.
Non-native pronunciations of English result from the common linguistic phenomenon in which non-native speakers of any language tend to transfer the intonation, phonological processes and pronunciation rules of their first language into their English speech. They may also create innovative pronunciations not found in the speaker's native language.
In sociolinguistics, hypercorrection is the nonstandard use of language that results from the overapplication of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form or phrase they use is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated.
A spelling pronunciation is the pronunciation of a word according to its spelling when this differs from a longstanding standard or traditional pronunciation. Words that are spelled with letters that were never pronounced or that were not pronounced for many generations or even hundreds of years have increasingly been pronounced as written, especially since the arrival of mandatory schooling and universal literacy.
Venetian, also known as wider Venetian or Venetan, is a Romance language spoken natively in the northeast of Italy, mostly in Veneto, where most of the five million inhabitants can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto: in Trentino, Friuli, the Julian March, Istria, and some towns of Slovenia, Dalmatia (Croatia) and Bay of Kotor (Montenegro) by a surviving autochthonous Venetian population, and in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the United States and the United Kingdom by Venetians in the diaspora.
Guttural R is the phenomenon whereby a rhotic consonant is produced in the back of the vocal tract rather than in the front portion thereof and thus as a guttural consonant. Speakers of languages with guttural R typically regard guttural and coronal rhotics to be alternative pronunciations of the same phoneme, despite articulatory differences. Similar consonants are found in other parts of the world, but they often have little to no cultural association or interchangeability with coronal rhotics and are (perhaps) not rhotics at all.
Judeo-Italian is a groups of endangered and extinct Jewish dialects, with only about 200 speakers in Italy and 250 total speakers today. The dialects are one of the Italian languages and are a subgrouping of the Judeo-Romance Languages. Some words have Italian prefixes and suffixes added to Hebrew words as well as Aramaic roots. All of the dialects except Judeo-Roman are now extinct.
Ashkenazi Hebrew is the pronunciation system for Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew favored for Jewish liturgical use and Torah study by Ashkenazi Jewish practice.
Sephardi Hebrew is the pronunciation system for Biblical Hebrew favored for liturgical use by Sephardi Jews. Its phonology was influenced by contact languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino), Judeo-Arabic dialects, and Modern Greek.
Yemenite Hebrew, also referred to as Temani Hebrew, is the pronunciation system for Hebrew traditionally used by Yemenite Jews. Yemenite Hebrew has been studied by language scholars, many of whom believe it retains older phonetic and grammatical features lost elsewhere. Yemenite speakers of Hebrew have garnered considerable praise from language purists because of their use of grammatical features from classical Hebrew.
Mizrahi Hebrew, or Eastern Hebrew, refers to any of the pronunciation systems for Biblical Hebrew used liturgically by Mizrahi Jews: Jews from Arab countries or east of them and with a background of Arabic, Persian or other languages of Asia. As such, Mizrahi Hebrew is actually a blanket term for many dialects.
Neapolitan is a Romance language of the Italo-Romance group spoken in Naples and most of continental Southern Italy. It is named after the Kingdom of Naples, which once covered most of the area, and the city of Naples was its capital. On 14 October 2008, a law by the Region of Campania stated that Neapolitan was to be protected.
Aljamiado or Aljamía texts are manuscripts that use the Arabic script for transcribing European languages, especially Romance languages such as Old Spanish or Aragonese. This alphabet is also called the Morisco alphabet.
The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Urmia, a dialect of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, was originally spoken by Jews in Urmia and surrounding areas of Iranian Azerbaijan from Salmas to Solduz and into what is now Yüksekova, Hakkâri and Başkale, Van Province in eastern Turkey. Most speakers now live in Israel.
Spanish and Portuguese Jews, also called Western Sephardim, Iberian Jews, or Peninsular Jews, are a distinctive sub-group of Sephardic Jews who are largely descended from Jews who lived as New Christians in the Iberian Peninsula during the few centuries following the forced expulsion of unconverted Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. They should therefore be distinguished both from the descendants of those expelled in 1492 and from the present-day Jewish communities of Spain and Portugal.
Haketia is an endangered Jewish Romance language also known as Djudeo Spañol, Ladino Occidental, or Western Judaeo-Spanish. It was historically spoken by the North African Sephardim in the Moroccan cities of Tétouan, Tangier, Asilah, Larache, Chefchaouen, Ksar el-Kebir, and the Spanish towns of Ceuta and Melilla. Tetuani Ladino was also spoken in Oran, Algeria. One of the distinctions between Ladino and Haketia (Haquetia) is that the latter incorporates Moroccan Arabic.
Syrian Jews are Jews who live in the region of the modern state of Syria, and their descendants born outside Syria. Syrian Jews derive their origin from two groups: from the Jews who inhabited the region of today's Syria from ancient times, and sometimes classified as Mizrahi Jews ; and from the Sephardi Jews who fled to Syria after the Alhambra Decree forced the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.
Judaeo-Piedmontese was the vernacular language of the Italian Jews living in Piedmont, Italy, from about the 15th century until World War II. It was based on the Piedmontese language, with many loanwords from ancient Hebrew, Provençal, and Spanish. Most of the speakers were murdered during the war, and as of 2015 it is virtually extinct.
Genoese Gibraltarians have existed in Gibraltar since the 16th century and later became an important part of the population. It is an ethnic community made up of descendants of Genoese and Ligurians who emigrated to Gibraltar during the Italian diaspora. The population of Gibraltar with Genoese surnames is around 20% of the total.