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Haketia

Romance language

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Haketia
Hakitia, Haquitía, Western Judeo-Spanish
An original letter in Solitreo script from Tangier, written in 1832.
Native to	North Africa
Region	Israel, Amazonas state in Brazil[1]
Ethnicity	North African Sephardic Jews
Native speakers	1000 (2023)
Language family	Indo-European Italic Latino-Faliscan Latin Romance Italo-Western Western Romance Gallo-Iberian Ibero-Romance West Iberian Castilian Judeo-Spanish Haketia
Early forms	Old Latin Vulgar Latin Proto-Romance Old Spanish
Dialects	Tetuani Ladino
Writing system	Originally, Hebrew, Solitreo; now, mostly Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
IETF	lad-015
Historical Judeo-Spanish speech communities in the Mediterranean. Ringed circles represent modern speech communities. Haketia is spoken on the southwest Mediterranean.

Haketia (Hebrew: חַכִּיתִּיָה Ḥakkītīyā; Arabic: حاكيتية; Spanish: Haquetía) (also written as HakitiaorHaquitía) is an endangered Jewish Romance language also known as Djudeo Spañol, Ladino Occidental, or Western Judaeo-Spanish. It was historically spoken by the North African Sephardim^[2] in the Moroccan cities of Tétouan, Tangier, Asilah, Larache, Chefchaouen, Ksar el-Kebir, and the Spanish towns of Ceuta and Melilla. Tetuani Ladino was also spoken in Oran, Algeria. One of the distinctions between Ladino and Haketia (Haquetia) is that the latter incorporates Arabic.

The name "Haketia" derived from the Arabic حكى ḥaká, "tell",^[3] and is therefore pronounced with IPA: [ħ], reflecting the Arabic ḥāʾ ح. In some places it is written『Jaquetía』with the same pronunciation.

The well-known form of Judaeo-Spanish spoken by Jews living in the Balkans, Greece, Turkey and Jerusalem is Ladino Oriental (eastern Ladino). Haketia may be described by contrast as Ladino Occidental. The language is a variety of Spanish that borrows heavily from Judeo-Moroccan Arabic. It evidently also contains a number of words of Hebrew origin and was originally written using Hebrew letters. There is some cultural resemblance between the two Judaeo-Spanish dialect communities, including a rich shared stock of romanzas (ballads) from medieval Spain, though both words and music often differ in detail (as indeed they do between one Oriental-Sephardic community and another).

The Haketia lexicon is made up mostly of Spanish words but 34.5% of words are from Arabic and 18.5% are from Hebrew. It contains many calques of Hebrew phrases, such as hiĵas de Israel, a literal translation of the Hebrew phrase בנות ישראל, meaning "daughters of Israel".^[4]

Other words have shifted in meaning. For example, שכן [ʃaˈχen], "neighbor", became sajén, which has taken on the meaning "Christian/Spanish".^[4]

Spanish prefixes and suffixes are combined with Hebrew base words.^[4]

• Native words form the plural by suffixing the morpheme |-s| (which corresponds to /-s/ in words ending with unstressed vowels and /-es/ otherwise). Masculine nouns loaned from Hebrew typically form the plural by suffixing the morpheme |-ˈim|, though some use |-ˈot| instead. For instance, the plural of masculine sefer 'book' is safarim, whereas the plural of masculine mazón 'victual' is mezonot. Feminine nouns loaned from Hebrew usually form the plural with |-ˈot|, though some use |-ˈim| instead.
• The dual number only appears in nouns loaned from Hebrew in certain verses, such as『Mosé subió a los shamaim』("Moses rose to the two heavens"). These nouns form the dual number by suffixing the morpheme |-ˈaim|.

Regular conjugations:

Haketia, unlike other varieties of Judaeo-Spanish, did not develop a literary tradition, so the language remained as a colloquial form of communication and was not used as a vehicle for formal education since in Spanish Morocco, Spanish was used, along with French, at the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools. Due to the influence of the Spanish and French conquests and the large number of Jews from northern Morocco who emigrated to Venezuela, Spain and later Argentina, the language was levelled with modern Spanish, which has contributed greatly to its extinction. Nevertheless, there has been a slow renaissance of the language, helped by musicians such as Doris Benmaman [lad], Mor Karbasi and Kol Oud Tof Trio [lad], among others. Jose Benoliel [lad] and Alegría Bendayán de Bendelac have both compiled Spanish-Haketía^[5] dictionaries, published in 1977 and 1995, respectively. The Caracas Center of Sephardic Studies [lad] regularly publishes articles in Haketia in its magazine Maguen-Escudo.^[6] The language is also spoken in some communities in the Amazon areas of Brazil.^[7]

Joseph Benoliel collected oral tradition, grammar, and a lexicon. Alegria Bendelac conducted fieldwork.^[8] Nina Pinto-Abecasis collected folklore.^[9]

Decline began as early as 1860 during the Spanish occupation of Tetuan and accelerated as a increasing share of Haketia speakers adopted Modern Spanish. Today Haketia is a declining language with only 1000 speakers remaining, down from 30,000 in 1900.^[4]

• Jewish Language Research website's page on Haketia
• List of articles written in Haketia at eSefarad.com
• Rodrigues da Cunha, Álvaro Fernando (2012): Narrativa na (língua judaico-marroquina) hakitía (Portuguese and English summaries)