Abstract:

Judeo-Spanish is the language spoken by Sephardim, the descendants of the Jews who were expelled from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492 and found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. Judeo-Spanish has been in contact with several languages and is itself the outcome of pervasive contact among Ibero-Romance languages. This paper focuses on the contact between Judeo-Spanish and Portuguese following the immigration of Portuguese Jews and Crypto-Jews to the Ottoman Empire from the late 15th century to the 18th century. The outcome of thsese contacts was the integration of linguistic patterns and lexical items from Portuguese into Judeo-Spanish via accomodation in the pre-koine, or later through other pathways, before Portuguese speakers definitively shifted to Judeo-Spanish.