Les langues juives à base iranienne

Abstract

This article is a new synthesis on the various Jewish dialects that came into being on the base of an Iranic language: classical Judeo-Persian in the Middle Ages and in the early modern time; modern Judeo-Persian dialects in various places of Iran stricto sensu; Judeo-Tadjik (Bukhori); Judeo-Tat (Juhuri). Glossed linguistic illustrations help understand the specificity of each of those manifestations of Jewish Iranophony and to understand the common points they share with other Jewish languages of non-Iranic origin. One of the point that could be of interest for the study of Jewish languages and fusion languages in general is the description of the convergence process between the two Semitic languages embedded in the Indo-European matrix of the various Judeo-Iranian languages : Arabic, as in almost every representative of the Iranic languages since the Islamic conquest of the Iranian world, and Hebrew, the presence of which is thought to be one of the criteria that allows to consider that a given language is a Jewish language. In this respect, Juhuri, the heritage language of Caucasian Jews, can be viewed as a liminal case inasmuch as its modern attestations barely contain any Hebrew component. However, this situation is probably due to the de-Judaization process this language was submitted to during Soviet times.