Lexical Elements of Slavic Origin in Judezmo on South Slavic Territory, 16–19th Centuries: Uriel Weinreich and the History of Contact Linguistics

Abstract

AbstractFrom the 19th–20th-century beginnings of modern linguistics, scholars reported on various results of interactions between diverse language speakers; but it was only with Uriel Weinreich’sLanguages in Contact(1953) that a solid theoretical basis for the systematic study of contact linguistics was elaborated. The present article studies lexical influences from South Slavic on Judezmo (Ladino/Judeo-Spanish) resulting from contact during the 16th–19th centuries between speakers of these two languages in the regions that, between 1918 and 1992, were known jointly as Yugoslavia. During the Ottoman and then Austro-Hungarian periods, borrowings in local Judezmo from South Slavic were relatively few compared with Turkisms. But from the nineteenth century, when the South Slavs gained political independence, Serbo-Croatian exerted an ever-increasing influence on Judezmo in this region. The case of Judezmo there differs considerably from Yiddish in Slavic Eastern Europe throughout the same period, as described by Uriel Weinreich and others.