For Turkey's youngest Jews, ancestral tongue fading away
Turkey’s Sephardic Jewish community has mobilized efforts to save the Ladino language from extinction, but after decades of repression, the swell of interest in their heritage language sounds more like a swan song.
For the young generation of Sephardic Jews in Turkey, their ancestral tongue, Ladino, is just a few words for Grandma's cuisine, a line or two from old songs and some snappy insults.
UNESCO considers Ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish or Judezmo, a severely endangered language. In Turkey, it is spoken by only about 10,000 people, mostly around Istanbul and Izmir. Other Ladino-speaking communities in Greece and North Africa have also diminished, according to the Unesco Atlas. Israel has declared Ladino endangered as well, and has established a National Authority for the Ladino language and culture.
The language was brought by Sephardic Jews when they came to Turkey in 1492. Much like the Yiddish language in its melting-pot character, Ladino is a Romance language very closely related to Spanish. Much of its vocabulary and grammar is recognizable as Spanish, but it has adopted many Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish words and idioms. While there are still books and magazines published in Ladino, the most common form of Ladino heritage still heard today is in songs, particularly lullabies.
"I could express the most tender and complicated sentiments in Ladino, which I learned by heart through the lyrics of old songs, but I lacked the vocabulary to express my everyday needs, such as asking for a glass of water," Rita Ender, a lawyer with a keen interest in minority issues, told Al-Monitor.
