Ladino is a
Romance language with a vocabulary derived mainly from
Old Castilian,
Hebrew, Turkish, and some French and Greek. Speakers are currently almost exclusively
Sephardi Jews, for example, in (or from)
Thessaloniki,
Istanbul and
Izmir.
Ladino has kept the postalveolar phonemes /?/ and /?/ of Old Castilian, which both changed to the velar /x/ in modern Castilian; Ladino also has an /x/ phoneme taken over from Hebrew. In some places it has also retained certain characteristic words, such as muestro for nuestro (our). Its grammatical structure is close to that of Castilian, with the addition of many terms from the Hebrew, Portuguese, French, Turkish, Greek, and Bosnian depending on the geographic origin of the speaker.
Ladino is in serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly as well as elderly olim (immigrants to Israel), who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. However, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music. In some countries, especially expatriate communities in Latin America, there is also a danger of extinction due to the risk of assimilation by modern Castilian.
The name Ladino is a variant of Latin. The language is also called Judæo-Spanish, Judæo-Espagnol, judeoespañol[1], Sefardi, Djudio, Dzhudezmo, Judezmo, and Spanyol or español sefardita; Haquitía (from the Arabic haka ???, "tell") refers to the dialect of North Africa, especially Morocco. The dialect of the Oran area of Algeria was called Tetuani, after the Moroccan town Tétouan, since many Orani Jews came from this city. In Hebrew, the language is called Spanyolit.
