Haketia: An Ecological Perspective Public
Witkin, Matthew (Spring 2019)
Published
Abstract
Ḥaketía is an Ibero-Romance language traditionally used by Sephardic communities in northern and coastal Morocco (particularly the cities of Tetouan, Tangier, Larache, Asilah, El Ksar el-Kebir, Essaouira, Fez, and Casablanca) and Oran, Algeria, in greatest regular use from 1492 to 1956 (albeit with evident decline from at least as early as 1860). It shares many features with historical and modern Peninsular Spanish as well as eastern Mediterranean varieties of Judeo-Spanish, but it has retained or acquired features that distinguish it from both of these. Over the centuries, Ḥaketía was used in these communities alongside numerous other language varieties that were used by other Moroccan communities: Moroccan Arabic, Classical Arabic, Moroccan Judeo-Arabic, Berber languages, Judeo-Berber, French, and peninsular Castilian. However, thanks to ongoing contact via trade and religious dialogue, it was not the only variety of Judeo-Spanish used by the Moroccan Sephardic communities, for in published written texts (for example, the communal edicts known as the takkanot or the rabbinic work Vayomer Yiẓḥak) they more often made use of an elite, pan-Sephardic literary register of Judeo-Spanish (referred to as Ladino in this study) that was shared with, and predominantly influenced by, other Sephardic communities in the Mediterranean. As a result, and unlike varieties of Judeo-Spanish spoken in the eastern Mediterranean such as those used in Salonika and Constantinople, Ḥaketía was relegated almost exclusively to the status of community vernacular that was rarely used in written texts. As such, its speakers imagined it as one, local variety of relatively low prestige on a broader continuum of Sephardic language varieties. Even so, the close-knit social networks of the Moroccan Sephardic communities favored its retention and its “covert” positive evaluation as a marker of community solidarity and belonging.
The ecological approach of this study contributes to ongoing re-evaluation of the use and status, as well as the reasons for retention, of Ḥaketía and Judeo-Spanish more generally. It emphasizes that Judeo-Spanish and Ḥaketía in particular are not merely the results of isolation of these communities from the changing norms of Peninsular Spanish. It also emphasizes that the differences between western (Moroccan) and eastern varieties of Judeo-Spanish are not only or principally the result of isolation from each other. Rather, in the sociohistorical contexts in which they lived, users of these varieties actively interacted with their unique language environments, changing their language to better adapt to the contexts in which they lived, prayed, and conducted business.
Keywords: Judeo-Spanish, Ḥaketía, Haketia, Ladino, Sephardic, Sephardim, Jews of North Africa, Morocco, Ecology of Language
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………….......1
Chapter 2: Features and Formation of Ḥaketía….…………………………………….9
Chapter 3: An Ecological Approach to Ḥaketía………………………………………..39
Chapter 4: The Decline of Ḥaketía……………………………………………………....54
Chapter 5: Conclusion……………………………………………………………….........69
References……………………………………………………………………………...........73
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