Towards a typological classification of Judeo-Spanish
Analyzing syntax and prosody of Bulgarian judezmo
Judeoespanyol (Judeo-Spanish) is one of the names given to those varieties of
Spanish spoken by descendants of the Jews that were expelled from Spain in
1492. There is neither a common designation nor is it spoken in one specific
area, nor is there any agreement on how to classify it. By some linguists Judeo-
Spanish has been considered a dialect of (Balkan) Spanish, by some a contact
language different from Spanish, and by others again, it has been discussed
whether it represented medieval Spanish, preserved unchanged for the last
five centuries. In this chapter, we argue that the Judeo-Spanish spoken in the
Bulgarian capital of Sofia is indeed a contact language, showing on the phonetic
side a puzzling similarity with Modern Bulgarian and on the syntactic side a
similarity with Modern European Spanish, although at the same time exhibiting
some archaisms of Old Spanish. It thus supports the idea that both divergence
and stability frequently occur together in situations of linguistic contact.
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