DLC Blog

The Mystery of Ladino

Did you know that there are still people around the world who speak an ancient form of Castilian Spanish? Many of them are right here in Washington State, especially in Seattle and the Puget Sound area. This language, called Ladino, is descended from the Castilian spoken in central Spain in the 1300s and 1400s. How has this language survived, and what sets it apart from “normal” Spanish?

For starters, the speakers of Ladino didn’t decide to leave Spain and carry their language with them. They mixed it over time with other dialects in the regions they settled, especially Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek, as these people relocated to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire (in the regions of modern-day Greece, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, and Bulgaria—the part next to Turkey). In essence, thousands of people spoke this ancient Spanish around the Mediterranean and Middle East, and in later years expelled once again from these regions or choosing to set out and explore, these speakers went to the Netherlands, the Caribbean, Brazil, the American Colonies, the Land of Israel, France, and Mexico. Of all the Ladino varieties, the root form is medieval Spanish written with Hebrew characters.

This is Baruch Spinoza, a famous Jewish philosopher whose family went from Spain to Amsterdam.

So who were the speakers of Ladino? As you may have guessed, they were Jewish victims of the Reconquista and the Inquisición in Spain. When Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchy of Spain, finished retaking all of Spain from the Moors (a North African people who had ruled Iberia from 711-1492), they expelled all the Jews and condemned to die those who stayed. In some cases, Jewish families were allowed to “convert” to Catholicism, however they were labeled morranos (swine) or conversos and were often murdered or expelled in later years. Nevertheless, Sephardic (of Spanish descent) Jews were able to continue living around the world, many speaking Ladino. According to one source,

“Pre-expulsion Spanish was preserved in Ladino (Spanish written in Hebrew characters) and was spoken and written by Sephardim until the twentieth century. Whether they resided in Salonica or Sarajevo, Amsterdam or Aleppo, Rhodes or Seattle, faithfulness to this pre-Columbian Spanish endured as a hallmark of the Sephardic diaspora.”
Gerber, Jane. “Sephardic Jewry and 1492,” in Humanities. National Endowment for the Arts, March/April 1992, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 30-33.

Today the last remaining communities of Ladino speakers exist in Turkey and a few places in the Balkans. Older generations may speak Ladino elsewhere, but because of the continued oppression and upheaval of Jewish communities the language is being replaced. Families like mine that came from Turkey and Greece to Seattle have switched to English, while almost all Jewish refugees who went to Israel speak Hebrew now. Hopefully the language will continue to survive, but it is looking doubtful. There are some efforts to revive the language, and I hope you all think about the diversity of languages and cultures related to Spain, Spanish, Castilian, and Latin American cultures and societies.

Here is information about Sephardic Jews.

Josh
DLC Student Mentor

Posted by Josh on December 26, 2006 04:02 PM.