Ladino

Ladino, also called Judeo-Spanish, is a Romance language that developed from medieval Spanish and was carried by Sephardic Jewish communities after their expulsion from Spain.

Old Spanish: The stage of Spanish spoken and written roughly from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries. Ladino preserves features of the Spanish its early speakers took beyond Iberia.
Alhambra Decree: The 1492 edict that ordered Jews to leave the crowns of Castile and Aragon or convert to Christianity. Its expulsion drove many Jewish speakers of Spanish into exile, where Ladino developed.
Language contact: The interaction of languages when their speakers communicate regularly. Contact with neighboring languages reshaped Ladino after Sephardic communities left Iberia.
Me'am Loez: An extensive Ladino commentary on the Hebrew Bible begun by Yaakov Culi in the eighteenth century. This influential work made biblical learning accessible in Ladino.
Holocaust: The systematic persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. The murder of Balkan Sephardic communities, including Salonika’s, devastated Ladino-speaking populations.
Spanish language: A Romance language that developed from spoken Latin in the Iberian Peninsula. Ladino grew from an earlier form of Spanish but developed along a distinct path.
Sephardic Jews: Jewish communities descended from those historically established in the Iberian Peninsula. Their migrations carried Ladino across the Mediterranean and into the Balkans.
Turkish language: A Turkic language spoken chiefly in Turkey and historically used across the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman-era contact contributed Turkish words to some Ladino varieties.
Ladino newspapers: Periodicals published in Judeo-Spanish for Sephardic communities, especially in the late Ottoman period. Newspapers expanded Ladino’s role in public debate and modern print culture.
Sephardic diaspora: The dispersion of Sephardic Jews from Iberia into communities across the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Americas. These migrations created the regional settings in which Ladino varieties took shape.

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