Judeo-Gascon

Until recently, Judeo-Gascon was probably one of the least known dialects of Gascon and Occitan and the least studied from a linguistic point of view. Its first coverage in scholarship has been in Nahon (2017); its linguistic characteristics have been investigated in depth in Nahon (2018), alongside comprehensive critical editions of the surviving Judeo-Gascon texts.

History

After the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, some Iberian Jews, who were originally speakers of Portuguese and/or Spanish, settled in the South-West of France in Gascon-speaking areas. In the course of time, these Jews were linguistically assimilated to their Gascon-speaking environment, though Spanish was kept, alongside Hebrew, as a written language for administrative, liturgical, and literary purposes.

The variety of Gascon spoken by the Jews, in a situation of diglossia with these languages, received a strong linguistic imprint that caused it to diverge from the Gascon dialects spoken by the coterritorial Christian populations. Additional influences of Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Provençal and Western Yiddish occurred too, due to immigration of Jews from other communities to Gascony.

Judeo-Gascon was still spoken in the early 20th century but disappeared quickly after the Second World War.

It was superseded by a variety of French that retains a large number of lexical and morphological influences from Judeo-Gascon. This variety of French with Judeo-Gascon substrate is still spoken nowadays by a few dozens of speakers, some of which still know a few sentences in Judeo-Gascon.