Judeo-Tat

Judeo-Tat
Cuhuri, Жугьури, ז׳אוּהאוּראִ‎
Native toAzerbaijan, Russia – North Caucasian Federal District, spoken by immigrant communities in Israel, United States (New York City)
EthnicityMountain Jews
Native speakers
80,000 (2010–2018)[1]
Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew
Language codes
ISO 639-3jdt
Glottologjude1256
ELPJudeo-Tat
Judeo-Tat is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010)
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Judeo-Tat or Juhuri (Cuhuri, Жугьури, ז׳אוּהאוּראִ) is a Judeo-Persian dialect of the Tat language historically spoken by the Mountain Jews, primarily in Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and today in Israel.[1] It belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian division of the Indo-European languages with some influence from the Hebrew language. In the era of Soviet historiography, the Mountain Jews were mistakenly considered to be related to the Muslim Tats of Azerbaijan. However, they do not share a common linguistic heritage, as the Mountain Jews speak a dialect of Persian with some linguistic features derived from Hebrew, while the Muslim Tats are an Iranian ethnic group native to the Caucasus and Persian speakers. The words Juvuri and Juvuro translate as "Jewish" and "Jews".

Judeo-Tat features Semitic elements in all linguistic levels of the language. Uniquely, Judeo-Tat retains the voiced pharyngeal approximant, also known as ayin (ع/ע), a phoneme whose presence is considered to be a hallmark of Semitic languages such as Arabic and no longer found in Modern Hebrew; no neighbouring languages in Azerbaijan or Dagestan feature it. [3]

Judeo-Tat is an endangered language[4][5] classified as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.[6]

  1. ^ a b Judeo-Tat at Ethnologue (26th ed., 2023) Closed access icon
  2. ^ Windfuhr, Gernot. The Iranian Languages. Routledge. 2009. p. 417.
  3. ^ Habib Borjian, “Judeo-Iranian Languages,” in Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin, eds., A Handbook of Jewish Languages, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015, pp. 234-295. [1].
  4. ^ Published in: Encyclopedia of the world’s endangered languages. Edited by Christopher Moseley. London & New York: Routledge, 2007. 211–280.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Clifton was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger Archived 2009-02-22 at the Wayback Machine