The language is related to Persian; it belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian division of the Indo-European languages. A similar, but still different 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. The words Juhuri and Juhuro literally translate as "Jewish" and "Jews."
Juhuri has Semitic (Hebrew/Aramaic/Arabic) elements on all linguistic levels. Juhuri has the Hebrew sound "ayin" (ע) while no neighboring languages have it.
In the early 20th century Juhuri used the Hebrew script. In the 1920s Latin script was adapted for it; later it was written in Cyrillic characters. Recently, the use of the Hebrew alphabet has enjoyed renewed popularity.
The language is presently spoken by an estimated 101,000 people:
- Israel: 70,000
- Azerbaijan: 24,000
- Russia: 7,000
External links
- Judeo-Tat page at Ethnologue.com
- Язык Горских Евреев Дагестана (Yazyk Gorskikh Yevreev Dagestana lit. "Language of the Mountain Jews of Dagestan")
- Горско-еврейский язык (словарь, грамматика, библиотека)
- Juhuri dictionary
- JUHURO.RU - Информационно развлекательный портал горских евреев Горские Евреи Израиля population ~70,000
- Горские Евреи Налчика Горские Евреи Налчика population ~12,000 (they live in Russia, USA, Israel, Australia, Germany, Azerbaijan, China)
- Горские Евреи Америки Mountain Jews of USA population ~60,000
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday August 28, 2008 at 17:48:26 PDT (GMT -0700)
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