The Jewish languages of North Africa

It is generally accepted that the direct influence of one language upon another in any domain whatsoever — phonological, syntactic, lexical or other — does no more than corroborate and give concrete form to certain prior relations, political or social, economic or cultural, maintained by the speakers (or transmitters) of those two languages. Without close and direct relations within shared activities, or joint participation in processes affecting both populations, the speakers of the two languages would never come to mingle and, first of all, to hear one another speak.

The sociolinguistic context of language contact

In order to clarify the conditions — linguistic as well as extra-linguistic — that favored the borrowing of a great many lexical units from French by the Judeo-Arabic languages (JAL) of North Africa (NA), we shall sketch out schematically certain political, social and cultural phenomena or processes in which the Jewish communities of NA became involved from the time of the French settlement in Algeria onward.

Sociocultural factors of borrowing.

Following the colonization of Algeria and Tunisia, and in Morocco well before the establishment of the French Protectorate, the Jewish masses of NA were practically the first to be schooled in the French manner, according to French curricula and in the French language.¹ In Algeria, the opening of French schools for Europeans and for native Jews as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, then the Crémieux decree of 1870 which granted French citizenship to all Algerian Jews, allowed French to spread through ever wider strata of the Jewish community. Before becoming, in very many families, a mother tongue, French was a language of culture and a language of communication with the colonists and administrators who were arriving in ever greater numbers from the metropole. In Morocco from 1860 and in Tunisia from 1878, the A.I.U.² set up a fairly dense network of primary schools, especially in the large Jewish urban centers, where French was taught as a mother tongue from textbooks then in use in France itself. Thousands of children thus reached the Certificat d’études at the beginning of the twentieth century. Later, the A.I.U. would also open supplementary courses providing instruction up to the level of the BEPC. Quite rapidly, then, bilingual Jewish populations developed in NA who spoke and used French as readily as their native Judeo-Arabic. This bilingual competence is, moreover, not unrelated to the intermediary role that the Jews of NA played, willingly or not, between the French authorities and the colonized Muslim populations. Independently of this work of schooling, French was at once established alongside Arabic as the official administrative language for the whole population. It would therefore serve to disseminate official instructions, propaganda and French ideas, and would be the chief instrument supporting the efforts at acculturation attempted by the French authorities among certain North African milieus. Gradually, as colonization advanced, the French language even became, quite quickly, a dominant language, gaining ever wider domains of public and private life. This process engaged the Jewish populations of the large cities in particular, because of the new social and economic role devolved upon them in the wake of colonization. Knowledge of French then constituted an inestimable advantage in public and economic life under the colonial regime, to say nothing of the primordial role this knowledge had in the new cultural life. Soon enough, the intensive use of French as a vehicular language in formal and intellectual life would lead certain Jewish speakers, Algerians especially, to abandon entirely the use of their native Judeo-Arabic. With the successes of Francization, French would thus also assume the vernacular role hitherto devolved upon the JAL, the latter serving above all to meet the immediate, everyday needs of communication, in family or community life. Among most North African Jewish speakers, however, French and JA had complementary functions — vehicular language for the former, vernacular for the latter. For all of them, French enjoyed a social and cultural prestige. Seen from this angle, the situation of bilingualism that developed in NA during the period of French colonization constitutes a typical case of diglossia. This prestige enjoyed by French did no more, in reality, than express the cultural changes — or more precisely the aspiration to such changes — that colonization had aroused in a certain North African elite, and particularly among the Jews of the large cities, who quite naturally maintained the closest relations with the representatives of French and Western civilization. One of the most decried slogans of French colonization was the introduction of modernization into the conquered or “protected” countries. Those touched by this modernization found themselves adopting new modes of life, new modes of thought and new forms of behavior. On the other hand, following the opening up in NA of new outlets for French industry, daily life henceforth brought the natives (of the large cities especially) into direct contact with numerous new products for which needs of consumption had likewise been aroused. With the intrusion of this form of industrial and technological civilization, new objects and new ideas thus made their appearance. But these new signifieds lacked adequate signifiers in the local vernaculars. This is doubtless the origin of the hundreds of French terms integrated into the JAL of NA, all relating to the various material aspects of the new modes of life. But whereas these lexical borrowings have as their principal function to denote and represent in the language new domains of extra-linguistic reality, other borrowings would play a more connotative role and would express above all the psychological impact that the concepts they designate had upon Judeo-Arabic speakers. Equivalent terms already exist, in fact, in the local vernaculars, but they cannot serve to convey the various associations that the new concepts or behaviors evoke. Thus, nouns such as [tomobil] or [brwïta] (= “automobile” and “wheelbarrow”) will be above all denotative words — we shall call them denotative borrowings — whereas in JM, for example, the verbs in the phrases [frikantti lbnãt] and [ka ndeklaro bas…] (= “you have frequented girls” and “we declare that…”) are there above all to connote, the corresponding verbs being almost perfect synonyms: [xarzti mea lbnat ka nqolo bas.]. We shall call such interferences connotative borrowings.

Properly linguistic factors of borrowing.

Thus these sociocultural processes, undergone rather than accepted by the populations of NA, made French a language of prestige, a language of civilization capable of conveying the realities of the modern world and of communicating them. For bilinguals as for monolinguals, French would henceforth constitute, on this account, a reservoir of neologisms that would come to complete the local vernaculars and fill their lexical insufficiencies in the various domains of modern life. But this contamination of our JAL by French, unconscious and natural as it is, is not due solely to external factors. It also depends, in large part, on the internal structure and the typological characteristics of these languages.

JA, JM and JT are indeed autonomous idioms, which evolve and function according to rules specific to them. They are not Arabic dialects in the common sense generally given to that name. Within each of the three groups, the differences are sometimes very great between the vernaculars of two neighboring Jewish communities. Yet they all differ from the neighboring Muslim vernaculars on the phonetic, morphological and above all lexical plane. A Jewish speaker wishing to communicate with a Muslim speaker must borrow the latter’s vernacular, or at least its phonetics, if he wishes to make himself well understood. This is because the Jewish vernaculars developed and were shaped within a quite different “cultural sphere,” turned as it is toward the most intense and authentic Jewish life, whereas the other vernaculars are turned toward Islam. The Hebrew stock is therefore very well represented in them, perfectly integrated phonologically and morphologically. By contrast, no reference is made in them to classical Arabic or to any other privileged state of the language. Very few, moreover, are the Jews who practiced literary Arabic before the independence of the NA countries.

The Jewish communities of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria having in fact lived in a kind of cultural and social sealed vessel, the contacts of the JAL with the Muslim vernaculars would be fairly limited. Apart from the common stock that must have stabilized for the JAL from the beginning of the Middle Ages, the lexical contributions would be very limited, since Muslim society too lived in a kind of withdrawal and since the new intellectual developments were expressed exclusively either by classical Arabic for the Muslims or by rabbinic Hebrew for the Jews. The walls of the Moroccan mellahs, of the Tunisian Haras and of the Algerian Jewish quarters are there, moreover, to safeguard this autarky and to prevent the infiltration of undesirable external influences. When, after colonization and despite certain reticences on the part of the religious leadership, these walls finally opened before French ideas and French objects, neither classical Arabic nor the Muslim vernaculars nor even rabbinic Hebrew — which had nonetheless managed to adapt to the vicissitudes of history — were in a position to offer a new lexicon capable of representing the new data of cultural reality. All these languages were themselves devoid of it. It is therefore quite natural that the French term should be adopted at the same time as its extralinguistic referent.

French influence is, however, far from being the first to have enriched the lexicon and the forms of the JAL of the Maghreb; well before the French settlement, the Jewish vernaculars of NA found themselves in direct contact with other Romance languages: Castilian throughout the Maghreb, Portuguese in Morocco and Italian in Tunisia especially.

The cultural relations between the two important Jewish centers in the Maghreb and in Castile-Aragon were always very close, and the exchanges of ideas and of persons took place from the ninth century onward, at first toward Spain especially, and subsequently, with the flowering of the Golden Age, rather in the other direction.³

At the end of the fourteenth century, however, exactly a century before the terrible expulsion from Spain of 1492, entire communities exposed to Christian persecution in Castile, Aragon, Catalonia and Majorca were forced to expatriate and to find refuge — a refuge very often precarious — in the cities of what is today Algeria (in Algiers in particular)⁴ and in Tunis. There, the émigrés founded Judeo-Spanish communities that had their own religious institutions but that nonetheless lived in a kind of symbiosis with the indigenous communities. In Tunis, this emigration gave rise to the Grana community, which has always taken care to distinguish itself from the Twansa, or local Jews. Subsequently, this community was reinforced by the arrival in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of Italian Jews, those from Livorno especially. At the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, thousands of Castilian and Portuguese Jewish refugees poured into the Moroccan cities, where they would form separate communities, the communities of the expelled (Qahal megorashim). A few decades earlier, the Portuguese had begun to occupy the Moroccan coast and had built ports with military installations from Arzila down to Agadir, by way of Safi and Mazagan — ports they held until the middle of the sixteenth century and where particularly active Jewish communities lived. The contribution of these waves of emigration and of these direct contacts with Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Italian or Portuguese speakers to the Jewish vernaculars of NA was quite considerable. In mixed communities, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish, such as existed in Algeria and in the north of Morocco, one even witnesses a pronounced Romanization of the local Judeo-Arabic vernaculars, the Romance stock owing to borrowing having taken on unsuspected proportions. These émigrés had in fact brought with them other habits, other objects, other modes of life and other concepts — in a word, a civilization advanced on the technical and intellectual plane. The traces of this “cultural shock” we find in all the Judeo-Arabic vernaculars, even in the communities most remote from the great urban centers, in the form of a few dozen words for some, hundreds for certain others, and even thousands for yet others. The Italian stock is especially important in the Jewish vernacular of Tunis, but terms such as [karrõsa] < carozza (“hackney cab”) and [sordi] / surdi < soldi are widespread throughout Jewish North Africa. Likewise, Portuguese borrowings are especially frequent in the Jewish vernaculars of the ports formerly held by the Portuguese, such as Mazagan, Safi or Azemmour, or else among certain speakers of Casablanca, a city where one finds Jews coming from all the Moroccan communities. Particularly entrenched terms are, for example, [lapis] (“pencil”) or [papagaio] (“parrot”), the latter widespread throughout Arabic Morocco. Let us add, moreover, that it is sometimes difficult to determine with precision the origin of a given borrowing, the morpheme being common to all the Romance languages, for example: [lonõr], “honor,” or [prõba], “proof,” [fabõr], “favor,” [bãnkal], “bank,” [familja], “family,” etc. However, since these terms are found in JAlg. as well as in JM and JT, we do not hesitate to attribute them to Castilian, or to later Spanish, because it is the language whose influence lasted longest (from the end of the fourteenth century onward) and which was in direct contact with Jewish vernaculars in almost the whole of the Maghreb, from Tunis to Marrakesh. Without this attribution to Judeo-Spanish, it would be difficult to explain how signifiers referring to concepts as universal and elementary as “family,” “honor” or “time” should have had to be borrowed and substituted, even quite generally, for the original Judeo-Arabic terms, the use of which has been lost in many vernaculars.

That said, it is through the medium of Judeo-Castilian that the greatest number of Spanish terms were integrated into the Jewish vernaculars of NA. These borrowings cover a very varied range of lexical domains, which we illustrate here by a few representative items.

— Names of various institutions: [familja] < familia; [gerra] < guerra (“war”); [skwela] < escuela (“school”); [tornaboda] < tornaboda (“post-wedding gathering”), this last in the Jewish vernacular of Fez; [lgarro] < cigarro (“cigarettes”); ssaka < saca (“tobacco excise office”).

— Names of utensils and furniture: [kotsera] < cuchara (“spoon”); [sakatrapo] < sacatrapos (“corkscrew”); [banjo] < baño (“bath,” “bathtub”).

— Names of garments: [blusa] < blusa (“blouse”); [qamiza] or [qmezza] < camisa (“shirt”).

— Culinary terms: [pasta] < pasta (“dough,” “a kind of stuffed potato dumpling”); [pallebe] < pan leve (“leavened bread,” “a kind of light cake”).

— The specialized vocabulary of certain card games: [ttuti] < tute, in Italian tutti (a kind of card game); [lkarta] < carta (“cards”); [rronda] < ronda (a kind of card game).

— Titles: [qabtan] < capitan (“captain”); [senjor] < señor (“mister”).

— Activities: [bizita] < visita (“visit”); [tpasjar] or [tpisjar] < paseo (“to take a walk”).

— Adverbs derived from adjectives: [sobito] < subito (“suddenly”).

It thus turns out that a long Romance tradition, through Judeo-Spanish above all, preceded French influence and in a sense prepared and facilitated it. This Romance tradition was so deep that in certain vernaculars French borrowings would be integrated according to Judeo-Spanish forms and patterns. Thus the Spanish plural suffix [-es] would often serve to construct the plural of certain nouns manifestly of French origin: [delège] > [delegès], [komersãn] > [komersãnes]. Likewise, as we shall see, integrated French adjectives would be treated syntactically like Spanish adjectives, that is, as adverbials and therefore invariable. Better still, in the verbal domain, there is even created a very interesting morpho-syntactic syncretism, bringing into play the affixal tools of Judeo-Arabic conjugation, the French root and the Spanish verbal suffix [-ar]. Thus, on the same model as [msa ka itpasjar] (“he went off to take a walk”), in which the verb [tpasjar], “to take a walk,” appears, we have new creations such as in [ja mamma, elas sinjarti ?] (“oh mother, why did you sign?”), where the verb [sinjarti] is formed on the basis of the French root [sinj] (sign-), the suffix [-ar], and the Judeo-Arabic suffix of the second person past [-ti]: [sinj]+[ar]+[ti] — [sinjarti]. We shall cite further examples of these formations below. Certain French borrowings thus pass into the JAL of NA through the syntactic or morphological mold set up for the Spanish terms. Let us add, however, that this phenomenon is far from general. We have noted such “Judeo-Arabic Hispano-French” interferences only in texts coming from speakers who lived in communities with a strong Judeo-Spanish population, as existed in many Algerian cities and as still exists in Casablanca, where since the 1920s Judeo-Arabic speakers, come from the South or the Center, have lived side by side with Judeo-Spanish speakers, come from the North and particularly from the Spanish zone, where the Jews speak — or spoke — a Jewish language heavily influenced by old Castilian, hakitiya.

Factors of integration concerning the speaker.

Despite the marked imprint of Castilian that one discovers in almost the whole of the Judeo-Arabic vernaculars of NA, it would occur to no one that this influence is uniform from one community to another, or within a single community, from one speaker to another. The number of foreign neologisms integrated and known actively or passively by a speaker, just like the total number of lexemes acquired by the same speaker over the course of his learning of the mother tongue, could never be the same in two different speakers of the same language. The acquisition of the lexicon, or of any portion of that lexicon, is certainly part of the linguistic competence of every speaker, but the modalities and above all the results of this acquisition cannot be universal, because they bring into play innumerable extra-linguistic factors that are never identical for two different speakers. In the domain of the integration of foreign neologisms that concerns us here, parameters such as the remoteness or proximity of the Judeo-Arabic speaker to a Spanish-speaking or French-speaking group, the close or loose relations he maintains with the group, participation in shared activities or shared processes, the consumption of manufactured products or the use of cultural goods more specific to that group, and above all the fact of practicing the language of that group at whatever level while continuing to use his natural Judeo-Arabic and thus being somewhat bilingual — all these factors and many others have a direct influence on the number of borrowings integrated into the vocabulary and discourse of our natural speaker, and on the extent of this integration. One should therefore not be surprised that in certain Jewish vernaculars of NA, the lexical interferences with Castilian or French are massively present, to the point of upsetting their lexical and morpho-syntactic balance, whereas in others they are counted only in dozens, or even in single units, and have no perceptible effect upon them.

Notes