Jewish languages
Jewish languages are the various languages and dialects that developed in Jewish communities in the diaspora. The original Jewish language is Hebrew, supplanted as the primary vernacular by Aramaic following the Babylonian exile. Jewish languages feature a syncretism of indigenous Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic with the languages of the local non-Jewish population.
Development of Jewish varieties of languages
Jewish communities were dispersed around the world in the diaspora which followed the Jewish-Roman wars. Some adopted the languages of their neighbors, but many developed new varieties of these languages, collectively termed "Jewish languages". Various reasons led to the development of distinctive Jewish varieties of the languages of their surrounding non-Jewish neighbors. Jews have often had limited exposure to non-Jewish society for various reasons, including imposed ghettoization (whether self-imposed separation or the forced creation of the ghetto by the host city) and strict endogamy, and as a result, Jewish languages diverged and developed separately from non-Jewish varieties in the territories they settled in. Due to frequent expulsions and migrations, single Jewish communities were often influenced by multiple distinct regional languages via language contact. For example, Yiddish, while based on Middle High German, has elements of Romance and Slavic. Jewish languages belong to a variety of genealogical language families, but these languages have common characteristics, making their study a distinct field of comparative linguistics known as Jewish linguistics. The common feature between the Jewish languages is the presence of Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic lexical components, stemming from the shared use of these languages in writing and liturgy. Many Jewish languages also display phonological, morphological, and syntactic features distinct from their non-Jewish counterparts. Most written Jewish languages are Hebraized, meaning they use a modified version of the Hebrew alphabet. These languages, unless they already have an accepted name (i.e. Yiddish, Ladino), are prefixed with "Judeo" (e.g. Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Aramaic, Judeo-Marathi, Judeo-Malayalam, etc). Bukharan Jews spoke Bukhori, a dialect of Tajik and Mountain Jews spoke Judeo-Tat.
In the early 20th century, secularism among Jews and large population shifts prompted the beginning of a shift from Jewish to non-Jewish languages. Even so, the majority of Jews in Eurasia and Africa, and many immigrants in North America and Palestine, still spoke Jewish languages. However, the Holocaust brought about a significant drop in the use of Jewish languages, especially Yiddish although it has now begun to become more prevalent.