Judeo-Romance varieties

Abstract Judeo-Romance languages (and varieties), as other Jewish languages, too, are fusion languages. Traditionally written in the Hebrew alphabet, Jewish languages are characterized by a high impact of linguistic features of Hebrew (and Aramaic). Among the Judeo-Romance languages, which are based on Romance languages, Judeo-Spanish (hereinafter referred to as JS), the language of the expelled Jews from Iberia (known as the Sephardim), is outstanding because of its intimate contact with the dominant languages in the areas of their settlement, especially in the Ottoman territories. However, only a few dictionaries of JS list loanwords, and they seldom pay attention to their origin or to the semantic shift that occurred during the process of borrowing. A comprehensive dictionary of JS (offering etymological, historical, semantical and diasystematical information) is missing up to now.