Judaeo-Spanish

Judaeo-Spanish, also called Ladino, Judezmo or Spaniolit, is a Romance language descended from Old Castilian Spanish and developed by Sephardic Jewish communities after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s. It spread across the Mediterranean Basin, especially the Balkans, Turkey and North Africa under Ottoman rule, absorbing vocabulary from Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and Arabic, and in some communities Greek, Slavic or Bulgarian elements, particularly for religious and cultural terms. The language was historically written in the Hebrew-derived Rashi script and its cursive form Solitreo, though Latin script has become more common in modern use. Judaeo-Spanish is now seriously endangered, with roughly 51,000 native speakers as of 2018, mostly elderly and concentrated in Israel, prompting the Royal Spanish Academy to announce conservation initiatives in 2017 including a dedicated Judaeo-Spanish academy branch.