In this article, the topic of Judeo-Urdu will be addressed from a multidisciplinary perspective, exploring its implications in different areas of daily life. The impact that Judeo-Urdu has had on society will be analyzed, as well as the possible implications it could have in the future. Through an exhaustive review of the specialized literature, we will seek to provide a comprehensive and updated vision of this topic, in order to encourage reflection and debate around it. Different approaches and expert opinions will be presented, as well as concrete examples that illustrate the relevance and scope of Judeo-Urdu today. This article aims to provide a complete and enriching overview of Judeo-Urdu, giving readers the tools necessary to fully understand it.
Judeo-Urdu | |
---|---|
Native to | Indian subcontinent |
Region | Bombay, Calcutta |
Ethnicity | Baghdadi Jews |
Era | 18th Century |
Hebrew script | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | – |
Glottolog | jude1269 |
IETF | ur-IN-Hebr |
Judeo-Urdu (Urdu: یہود اردو, romanized: yahūd urdū; Hebrew: אורדו יהודית, romanized: ūrdū yehūdīt) was a dialect of the Hindustani language spoken by the Baghdadi Jews in the Indian subcontinent living in the areas of Mumbai and Kolkata towards the end of the 18th century .It is a dialect that was written in the Hebrew script and found to be utilized for several pieces of literature, such as Inder Sabha ,a copy of which is kept at the British Library.
The Judeo-Urdu dialect was written in the Hebrew script. The orthography is one of the primary reasons for this dialect being associated with Urdu, rather than Hindi or Hindustani, as the spelling of lemmas found in literature written in the Judeo-Urdu dialect seem to correlate with the Perso-Arab spelling. For instance, Arabic loanwords which contain the letters ط would be mapped to the Hebrew equivalent ט, a pattern which is consistent with other loanwords and loan-letters.
However, when it comes to the representation of sounds found in Indo-Aryan languages, such as retroflex consonants, they were not represented by unique or modified Hebrew letters. Rather, alveolar consonants were also used to represent these sounds, as well as aspirated consonants. This could create ambiguity as some letters, like Dalet, could denote up to four different phonemes, while an unvocalised Gimel, could denote potentially up to five.