Judeo-Algerian Arabic

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Judeo-Algerian Arabic also known as Algerian Judeo-Arabic is a dialect of Judeo-Arabic based on Algerian Arabic. Today it is nearly extinct with only a few elderly speakers remaining. The language has a large amount of historical literature. It contained influence from several dialects of Arabic as well as from Hebrew and Aramaic.

Contents

Judeo-Algerian Arabic
Native to Algeria, Israel
Ethnicity Algerian Jews
Dialects
Hebrew Alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3

History

Historically, Algerian Jews would use Judeo-Algerian Arabic as every day vocabulary while using Hebrew for religious purposes. They would also use several other languages such as the Berber languages, and Arabic. [1] With the french conquest of Algeria in 1830 the Algerian Jews began to gradually take on French influence and language. With this process speeding up in 1870 when the Jewish population of Algeria were made French citizens by the Crémieux Decree. [1] A linguistic study on the Algiers dialect of Judeo-Algerian Arabic would occur in 1912 with another study based on the Constantine dialect would occur in 1988. [2]

Decline

The decline of Judeo-Algerian Arabic would begin with the frenchification of the Algerian Jews as Judeo-Arabic began being replaced by French. The expulsion of the Algerian Jews in the wake of 1948 Israeli war of independence and the 1962 Algerian independence led to a significant decline as speakers of the language were scattered amongst lrger non Judeo-Arabic speaking populations. [3]

Status

Today Judeo-Algerian Arabic is nearly extinct with a shrinking amount of elderly speakers remaining. This has made linguistic research difficult as the normal method of interviewing speakers won't work. [3] As such the research being done now has increasingly shifted to analyzing Judeo-Algerian Arabic literature. [2]

Features

Judeo-Algerian Arabic is a member of the North African Judeo-Arabic group. It contains influence from Moroccan and Tunisian Judeo-Arabic, Moroccan and Tunisian Arabic, French, Hebrew, Aramaic and to a lesser extent Spanish and Italian. Similar to many other Jewish languages, Judeo-Algerian Arabic uses the Hebrew script instead of the Arabic script more popular in Algeria. Judeo-Algerian Arabic also contains several conservative features abandoned in regular Algerian Arabic. [2] Judeo-Algerian Arabic had different dialects for different Algerian Jewish population with there being dialects for the cities of Constantine and Algiers. [2]

Usage

There is a large amount of Judeo-Arabic literary texts, and Judeo-Algerian Arabic no exception. Today the study of Judeo-Algerian Arabic texts is the primary method used by linguists to study Judeo-Algerian Arabic. [1] These texts include bible translations, liturgy, non biblical translation, newspapers and more. [3] There is samples of Judeo-Algerian Arabic available online.

Sample Text

Judeo-Arabic [4] English [4]
האדול הומאן אצלאטן והאדול הומאן דוד חזקיה משיח דניאל חנניה מישאל עזריהThese are the sultans; and these are David, Hezekiah, Masiah, Daniel, Hanaiah, Mishael, and Azariah

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "Linguistic analysis of an Algerian Judeo-Arabic text from the 19th century". Cairn.info. January 20, 2024. Retrieved January 20, 2024.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Tirosh-Becker, Ofra (2022-12-14). "Part-of-Speech and Morphological Tagging of Algerian Judeo-Arabic". Northern European Journal of Language Technology: 2 via Academia.edu.
  3. 1 2 3 Tirosh-Becker, Ofra (2022-01-01). "TAJA Corpus: Linguistically Tagged Written Algerian Judeo-Arabic Corpus". Journal of Jewish Languages: 25 via Academia.edu.
  4. 1 2 "LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF AN ALGERIAN JUDEO-ARABIC TEXT FROM THE 19TH CENTURY" (PDF). Presses Universitaires de France : 12 via scholars.huji.ac.il.