Judeo-Tat


Judeo-Tat or Juhuri is the traditional language of the Mountain Jews of the eastern Caucasus Mountains, especially Azerbaijan and Dagestan, now mainly spoken in Israel.
The language is a form of Persian which belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian division of the Indo-European languages. The 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. The words Juvuri and Juvuro literally translate as "Jewish" and "Jews".
Judeo-Tat has Semitic elements on all linguistic levels. Judeo-Tat has the Semitic sound "ayin/ayn", whereas no neighbouring languages have 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:

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 e.g. Talysh, Ossetian, and Kurdish. However, it also bears strong influence from other sources:
Medieval Persian: Postpositions are used predominantly in lieu of prepositions e.g. 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 e.g. "honey", "morning".
Hebrew: As other Jewish dialects, the language also has many Hebrew loanwords e.g. "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
Azeri: Vowel harmony and many loan words
Russian: Loanwords adopted after the Russian Empire's annexation of Daghestan and Azerbaijan
Northeast Caucasian languages: e.g. "small"
Other common phonology/morphology changes from classical Persian/Arabic/Hebrew:
Being a variety of the Tat language, Judeo-Tat itself can be divided into several dialects:
The dialects of Oğuz and the now extinct Jewish community of Mücü have not been studied well and thus cannot be classified.