Moroccan Judeo-Arabic Dialects as Jewish Languages: Structures, Uses and Diversity

Moroccan Judeo-Arabic Dialects as Jewish Languages provides an in-depth analysis of the diachrony and synchrony of the Judeo-Arabic dialects formed in Morocco from the 16th onwards, their diversity, their constituents, their forms, their categories, and their uses in community and family life.

Drawing on extensive linguistic data from a wide range of sources, including manuscripts and oral performances, this book examines the phonetics, phonology and morphology of the Judeo-Arabic dialects to offer insightful analyses and discoveries. Framed by a theoretical and methodological introduction, this book combines the findings of fieldwork with hundreds of informants from over 130 urban and rural Moroccan Jewish communities, for whom Judeo-Arabic is their mother tongue and primary language, with the advantages of modern linguistic, sociolinguistic, and socio-pragmatic analyses that allow for a better understanding of natural dialectal phenomena and their interpretation.

The book will be relevant to scholars of Arabic dialectology, sociolinguistics, and Jewish languages.

Joseph Chetrit was formerly Head of The Center for the Study of Jewish Culture in Spain and Islamic Lands and Dean in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa, Israel. Prof. Chetrit has taught in the fields of Jewish Languages, Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew Linguistics, French Linguistics and North-African Jewish Poetry at various institutions across his career.