Judeo-Tat


Judeo-Tat or Juhuri is a Judeo-Persian dialect and the traditional language spoken by the Mountain Jews in the eastern Caucasus Mountains, especially Azerbaijan, parts of Russia and today in Israel. It belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian division of the Indo-European languages, albeit with heavy influence from Hebrew. The words Juhuri and Juhuro translate as "Jewish" and "Jews".
The Iranic Tat language is spoken by the Muslim Tats of Azerbaijan, a group to which the Mountain Jews were mistakenly considered to belong during the era of Soviet historiography though the languages probably originated in the same region of the Persian Empire.
Judeo-Tat features Semitic elements in all linguistic levels of the language. Uniquely, Judeo-Tat retains the voiced pharyngeal approximant, also known as ayin, a phoneme whose presence is considered to be a hallmark of Semitic languages such as Arabic and no longer found in Modern Hebrew; no neighbouring languages feature it.
Judeo-Tat is an endangered language classified as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

Distribution

The language is spoken by an estimated 101,000 people:

Dialects

Being a variety of the Tat language, Judeo-Tat itself can be divided into several dialects:
  • Quba dialect.
  • Derbent dialect.
  • Kaitag dialect.
The dialects of Oğuz and the now extinct Jewish community of Mücü have not been studied well and thus cannot be classified.

Alphabet

In the early 20th century, Judeo-Tat used the Hebrew script. In the 1920s, the Latin script was adapted for it; later it was written in Cyrillic. The use of the Hebrew alphabet has enjoyed renewed popularity.

Influences and etymology

Judeo-Tat is a Southwest Iranian language and is much more closely related to modern Persian than most other Iranian languages of the Caucasus. However, it also bears strong influence from other sources:
Medieval Persian: Postpositions are used predominantly in lieu of prepositions, for example in modern Persian: باز او > Judeo-Tat æ uræ-voz "with him/her".
Arabic: like in modern Persian, a significant portion of the vocabulary is Arabic in origin. Unlike modern Persian, Judeo-Tat has almost universally retained the original pharyngeal/uvular phonemes of Arabic, for example "honey", "morning".
Hebrew: As in other Jewish dialects, the language also has many Hebrew loanwords, for example "table", "luck", "rich". Hebrew words are typically pronounced in the tradition of other Mizrahi Jews. Examples: and are pronounced pharyngeally ; is pronounced as a voiced uvular plosive. Classical Hebrew and , however, are typically pronounced as /v/ and /o/ respectively
Azerbaijani: Vowel harmony and many loan words
Russian: Loanwords adopted after the Russian Empire's annexation of Daghestan and Azerbaijan
Northeast Caucasian languages: "small"
Other common phonology/morphology changes from classical Persian/Arabic/Hebrew:
  • > /o/, /æ/, or /u/ as in "book", "road/path", "sacrifice"
  • /o/ > /u/ as in "Absalom"
  • /u/ > /y/, especially under the influence of vowel harmony
  • Stress on the final syllable of words
  • Dropping of the final /n/ as in /soχtæ/ "to make"