Abstract
This article explores the diminished use of Judeo-Spanish among Jews living in Turkey and asks the following research question: What factors, ideologies, and practices contribute to the demise of Judeo-Spanish? To address this question, we employed life history inquiry based on two oral history archives documenting elderly Turkish-Jewish community members’ lived experiences in Turkey. We argue that the endangerment of Judeo-Spanish is caused by the reciprocal interaction between broader, societal language ideologies and family-internal language practices. In particular, the opening of the Alliance schools among the Turkish Jewry in the second half of the nineteenth century relegated Judeo-Spanish to a lower social standing and promoted French as the language of Western enlightenment while Turkish nationalism and the ‘Turkish-only’ language policies of the newly formed Turkish Republic aimed to create a monolingual public space in Turkey. To further explain how monolingual language ideologies influenced the use of Judeo-Spanish in the family, we discuss the negative language attitudes towards Judeo-Spanish that are reproduced in the family and specific language practices (e.g., code-meshing) that relegate Judeo-Spanish to linguistic periphery, yet keep this language as a marker of ethnic identity.
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