Haketia

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Haketia
Hakitia, Haquitía, Western Juedo-Spanish
An original letter in Solitreo script from Tangier, written in 1832.
Native to	North Africa
Region	Israel
Ethnicity	North African Sephardic Jews
Language family	Indoeuropean languages Italic Romance Western Gallo-Iberian Ibero-Romance West Iberian Castilian languages Judeo-Spanish Haketia
Early forms	Latin Old Spanish
Dialects	Tetuani Ladino
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; Arabic: حاكيتيا‎; Spanish: Haquetía) (also written as Hakitia or Haquitía) 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^[1] in the Moroccan cities of Tétouan, Tangier, Asilah, Larache 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.

Description[]

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 name "Haketia" derived from the Arabic حكى ḥaká, "tell",^[2] and is therefore pronounced with IPA: [x], reflecting the Arabic ḥāʾ ح. In some places it is written "Jaquetía" with the same pronunciation.

Haketia is considered to have influenced Llanito, the vernacular spoken in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar due to migration of Moroccan Jews.

Modern use[]

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  [lad], Mor Karbasi and  [lad], among others.  [lad] and Alegría Bendayán de Bendelac have both compiled Spanish-Haketía^[3] dictionaries, published in 1977 and 1995, respectively. The  [lad] regularly publishes articles in Haketia in its magazine .^[4] The language is also spoken in some communities in the Amazon areas of Brazil.^[5]

References[]

External links[]

• List of articles written in Haketia at eSefarad.com
• Rodrigues-da-Cunha, Alvaro Fernando (2012): Narrativa na (língua judaico-marroquina) hakitía (Portuguese summary)