Judeo-Tat | |
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Cuhuri, Жугьури, ז׳אוּהאוּראִ | |
Native to | Azerbaijan, Russia – North Caucasian Federal District, spoken by immigrant communities in Israel, United States (New York City) |
Ethnicity | Mountain Jews |
Native speakers | 80,000 (2010–2018)[1] |
Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | jdt |
Glottolog | jude1256 |
ELP | Judeo-Tat |
Judeo-Tat is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010) | |
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Judeo-Tat or Juhuri (Cuhuri, Жугьури, ז׳אוּהאוּראִ) is a Judeo-Persian dialect and the traditional language spoken by the Mountain Jews in the eastern Caucasus Mountains, especially Azerbaijan, parts of Russia and today in Israel.[1] It belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian division of the Indo-European languages, albeit with heavy influence from Hebrew. The words Juvuri and Juvuro translate as "Jewish" and "Jews".
The Iranic Tat language is spoken by the Muslim Tats of Azerbaijan, a group to which the Mountain Jews were mistakenly considered to belong during the era of Soviet historiography though the languages probably originated in the same region of the Persian empire.
Judeo-Tat features Semitic elements in all linguistic levels of the language. Uniquely, Judeo-Tat retains the voiced pharyngeal approximant, also known as ayin (ع/ע), a phoneme whose presence is considered to be a hallmark of Semitic languages such as Arabic and no longer found in Modern Hebrew; no neighbouring languages feature it. [3]
Judeo-Tat is an endangered language[4][5] classified as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.[6]
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