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Paper short abstract:

This paper approaches Ladino's revitalisation as a multilanguage process allowing their speech communities to re-imagine Sephardi as a unified diaspora. How are its similarities to another Judeo language, Haketiya, being asserted through coalition-building across cultural and linguistic differences?

Paper long abstract:

Inscribed in UNESCO's list of endangered languages, Ladino ("judéo-espagnol") has its linguistic base on the regional medieval Iberian romance languages, punctuated by Hebrew words, to which were added elements of the languages spoken in the Jewish diasporic communities, after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in the late XV century. In some regional contexts, as in Salonica, Greece, Ladino was intuitively used as an "organic Esperanto", allowing Sephardi Jews to communicate and build cultural bridges with their neighbours (Naar 2019). With the rise of nationalism in Europe, the decimation of thousands of Greek Sephardim Jews in the Holocaust, the migration in mass to Israel and the adoption of modern Hebrew as the national language, Ladino declined.

Against the backdrop of this historical context, during the past decade, Ladino is undergoing a process of revitalisation led by Jewish cultural associations. Although Sephardim no longer use Ladino as a 'vernacular language' - a primary means of communication -, its digital afterlife is now part of a broader 'post-vernacular' (Shandler 2006) milieu whose initiatives aim to disseminate the language through a process of linguistic 'infusions' (Benor 2018) and to reconnect networks of Jewish individuals and communities. Based on my participation in Ladino e-learning classes and following e-Sefarad.com digital channel talks, this paper approaches Ladino's ongoing heritagisation by addressing two concurrent processes: (i) the way through which Ladino's communities of speech are re-imagining Sefardic culture as a unified diaspora identity and (ii) how this process entails practices of 'ladinisation' of another minority Judeo-language, Haketiya.