Is the Lost Language of Iraqi Jews Really Lost?

From Tablet Magazine

For centuries, the Jews of Baghdad spoke their own form of Arabic, different from that of their Muslim and Christian neighbors. After nearly the entire community left Iraq between 1948 and 1951, that language began to disappear. This Tablet article follows the scholars and community members trying to preserve it.

The language

A Jewish way of speaking Arabic

Parts of the Talmud were written in Babylonia, today's Iraq, in a Jewish form of Aramaic, and Jews in northern Iraq kept speaking Aramaic dialects into the twentieth century. In Baghdad, Jews spoke Judeo Arabic. The Cambridge scholar Geoffrey Khan explains that it differs from the Arabic of Baghdad's Muslims and Christians in sound, grammar, and vocabulary, and that some of its features may go back to Aramaic. An accent alone could reveal that a speaker was Jewish.

Why it faded

A spoken language without books

Writers in Iraq, Jewish and non Jewish alike, valued classical Arabic and rarely wrote in everyday speech, so little literature exists in the dialect. The Israeli novelist Samir Naqqash, who kept writing in Arabic all his life, was one of the few to use it, and the 2013 film The Dove Flyer, based on Eli Amir's novel, is the only feature film made in Iraqi Judeo Arabic. In new countries, children grew up speaking Hebrew or English, and the language was not passed on.

Saving it

Recording the last speakers

In London, Eli Timan, who left Baghdad at 16, has recorded about 100 hours of conversations with Iraqi Jews in Britain, Canada, and Israel, with support from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS, University of London. Memoirs such as Violette Shamash's Memories of Eden include glossaries of family words, and the British Library holds a large collection of Judeo Arabic books and manuscripts. Some young Iraqi Jewish parents in London have even begun talking about classes to bring the language back.

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This summary was written by JIMENA and is based on “Is the Lost Language of Iraqi Jews Really Lost?” by Mardean Isaac, published by Tablet Magazine. The original article belongs to Tablet.