Writing and Printing

Judeo-Malayalam

Judeo-Malayalam (Malayalam: യെഹൂദ്യമലയാളം, yehūdyamalayāḷaṃ; Hebrew: מלאיאלאם יהודית, malayalam yəhūḏīṯ) is the traditional language of the Cochin Jews (also called Malabar Jews), from Kerala, in southern India, spoken today by a few dozen people in Israel and by fewer than 25 people in India. Judeo-Malayalam is the only known Dravidian Jewish language. Since it does not differ substantially in grammar or syntax from other colloquial Malayalam dialects, it is not considered by many linguists to be a language in its own right, but rather a dialect, or simply a language variation. Judeo-Malayalam shares common features with other Jewish languages like Ladino, Judeo-Arabic and Yiddish. For example, verbatim translations from Hebrew to Malayalam, archaic features of Old Malayalam, Hebrew components agglutinated to Dravidian verb and noun formations and special idiomatic usages based on its Hebrew loanwords. Due to the lack of long-term scholarship on this language variation, there is no separate designation for the language (if it can be so considered), for it to have its own language code (see also SIL and ISO 639). Unlike many Jewish languages, Judeo-Malayalam is not written using the Hebrew alphabet. It does, however, like most Jewish languages, contain many Hebrew loanwords, which are regularly transliterated, as much as possible, using the Malayalam script. Like many other Jewish languages, Judeo-Malayalam also contains a number of lexical, phonological and syntactic archaisms, in this case, from the days before Malayalam became fully distinguished from Tamil. In spite of claims by some Paradesi Jews that their ancestors' Ladino influenced the development of Judeo-Malayalam, so far no such influence, not even on the superficial lexical level, is found. There is, however, affiliation with Mappila Malayalam, especially of North Malabar, in words such as khabar or khabura (grave), and formations such as mayyattŭ āyi (മയ്യത്ത് ആയി) used by Muslims and śālōṃ āyi (ശാലോം ആയി) used by Jews for died (മരിച്ചു പോയി, mariccu pōyi in standard Malayalam).

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸Aimaq dialect
• ▸Kalamata Castle
• ▸Eric Gill

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