LCTL of the Month: Ladino

Everyone has heard the story of how Christopher Columbus was sent out in 1492 to prove that the world was round, right? It has a nice ring to it, but sadly, there's very little truth to it. Fact is, anyone who has ever been on the high seas could tell you that the Earth is obviously round. If it was, then a ship's sails would never disappear below the horizon, or appear to emerge from the water as they sail towards you.

The bit about King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella bank rolling the project is true. Of course they had much bigger things on their mind. These rulers willing to take a gamble on a short cut to India were both powerful monarchs in their own right, and their marriage was the culmination of years of warfare and diplomacy known as the Reconquista, the "Reconquest."

You see, in the year 711, armies from North Africa conquered what is now Spain and Portugal. During first Arab, then Moorish, rule, the Iberian Peninsula was relatively distant from the civil wars and dynastic struggles in the Middle East. Islamic Spain was rich in both hard currency and human capital. Muslim scholars thrived there, but so did Christian and Jewish people who were members of a protected, if second-class, community.

By 1492, most of the Moorish kingdoms, city states and principalities had been conquered. The combined force of the Ferdinand and Isabella fell on the city of Granada, tossing out the last Muslim rulers in Spain. Shortly after, Ferdie and Iz issued the Alhambra Decree which expelled all the Jews from Spain.

All the Jews. From an entire kingdom. That takes some royal cajones, if you ask me.


Needless to say, most Jews simply up and moved to the few countries accepting Hebrews and She-brews at the time. Many ended up settling back under Muslim rule. The Islamic superpower of the time was the Ottoman Empire, who had only decades before, in 1453, finally conquered the Byzantine Empire. As the Hebrew name for Spain at the time was "Sephard," these unwilling migrants became known as Sephardi or Sephardic Jews.

What makes the Sephardic communities of the Ottoman Empire interesting from a linguistic standpoint is that, for centuries, people in the Middle East, first in Turkey and Greece and later in Israel, have been speaking a particular form of Spanish known as Ladino.

Ladino differs from Modern Castilian Spanish in a number of ways, but it is not a fifteenth century version of that language. Ladino continued to evolve from 1492 to the present, it just did so independently of developments in the Iberian Peninsula. Grammatical changes that took place in Spain and in Latin America after the fifteenth century didn't happen in Ladino because it wasn't being spoken there. Likewise, changes that happened in Ladino didn't happen in Spanish elsewhere because they weren't speaking to the Sephardim everyday.


Ladino is a wonderful parallel for evolution via isolation. It is like a road was built between two groups of frogs. When the frogs on either side of the road are no longer doing the amphibian nasty with each other- the one group has become two and they will begin to drift apart, eventually becoming different species.

Ladino still uses the singular formal pronoun vos (along with its plural vosotros). Continental Spanish stopped using vos and started using vosotros for singular and plural sometime after 1492. Both lack the pronouns Usted and Ustedes found in American Spanish(es):

Ladino	Vos avlash "You (formal) speak"	Vosotros avlash "You all (formal) speak"
Castellano (Spain)	Vosotros hablaís "You (formal) speak"	Vosotros hablaís "You all (formal) speak"
American Spanish	Usted habla "You (formal) speak"	Ustedes hablan "You all (formal) speak"

Changes in pronunciation also occurred independently in Spanish and in Ladino. For example, the sounds [ʃ] (English: “shhhh”) and [ʒ] (English: zh as in “measure” or “pleasure”) both became [x] (English: kinda-H-sound-you-make-when-you-breath-on-a-pair-of-glasses-to-clean-them) in Spain. The Modern Spanish letter J is used for this [x] sound. Thus the Spanish bajo (meaning above) is pronounced basho in Ladino as it was in the 15th century. In Ladino mujer (or woman) is pronounced with the original [ʒ] (the sound of English measure or pleasure).

Circumstances of history not only built a superhighway between Spanish and Ladino, they also moved the latter into an entirely different environment. By virtue of being spoken in the Ottoman Empire, Ladino influenced and was influenced by a different set of linguistic neighbors. Ladino borrowed from Turkish, such as the verb "alikodar" (to have someone in place) from the Turkish verb "alikoymak."

Imperial Palaces crumble and are rebuilt. Monarchs and all their edicts fade faster than reality TV stars. Languages, however, have a staying power that any Sultan, King or Holy Roman Emperor can only envy. While, on one hand, they change from generation to generation, yet they have a heritage that stretches back in history, beyond the horizon of mutual intelligibility.