Abstract:

Besides containing Hebrew and Aramaic elements as do all languages spoken by Jews, modern Judeo-Spanish, whose main base is the Castilian spoken in 1492 in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, shows influences of Hispanic Arab, Aragonese, Catalan and Portuguese origin, and also of Italian and other languages, which are the result of contact with speakers in the Balkan Peninsula, Turkey, and the Middle East, and with French and German as languages of culture since the half of the 19th century.
Linguistic factors, like the nature of the relationship between languages in contact — specifically the degree of typological similarity between them — and relevant social and socio-political aspects of the contact which operated at both the individual and group level, involved varying degrees of influence of each of these languages, first on the Castilian spoken by Jews expelled from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in
1492, and later on Judeo-Spanish. Several grammatical patterns and lexical items from non-Castilian are detectable in modern Judeo-Spanish. Among these borrowed materials, those whose source is Portuguese stand out, although in Sephardic literature, one rarely finds references that indicate any relation of Judeo-Spanish to Portuguese.
The contact of Judeo-Spanish speakers with Portuguese speakers involved not only those who arrived in the Ottoman Empire shortly after the expulsion from Castile and Aragon in 1492, but also ex-conversos, i.e. Jews and their descendants who, after voluntary or forced conversion to Christianity, decided in the first decades of the 16th century to return to the open practice of Judaism, and those who throughout the 17th and 18th centuries emigrated from Portugal to the Ottoman Empire or settled in the
port cities on the Adriatic Sea and the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Other than the fact that features of Portuguese are detectable in Judeo-Spanish, we know little or nothing about the situations of contact among Judeo-Spanish and Portuguese speakers. Questions about what types of shift took place, what was the intensity of the contact, how and when Portuguese patterns were transferred to Judeo-Spanish, what was the social context in which language contact occurred or the degree of cultural pressure to which the Portuguese Jews were subjected, have not yet been addressed in research. A description of the most salient modern Judeo-Spanish features which have been identified as Portuguese features and their analysis within the framework of language in contact theories, will allow us to deal with some of those questions.