Language Name: Haketía. The glottonym of this language can be written in many ways. This is because there is no standardized orthographic system and it effects even to the name of the language. We can find it written as: Jaquetía, Jaquitía, Jaketía, Haketía, Hakitía, or Yaketía, among others. Language Family: Indo-European. Italic Romance. Western Romance. Ibero-Romance. Ibero-Spanish. Judeo-Spanish. Geographical Location: Morocco, Canada, Venezuela, Israel, the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Estimated Population: In 1900, there were an estimated 30,000 speakers. The number of speakers today is very difficult to estimate due to the small number and the constant loss of them.
Contributor: Rocío Rojas-Marcos Albert
Universidad de Sevilla
rrojasmarcos@us.es
more about the author
Yasmine Beale-Rivaya
Project Director/Coordinator
yb10@txstate.edu
INTRODUCTION
1- Why is Haketía considered a minority/ized language or culture?
Haketía is currently a very minority language, but it is reluctant to disappear because such a disappearance would also mean the definitive loss of the Sephardic cultural heritage. At this point of the 21st century it is not the mother tongue of any community of speakers, but it continues to be used as a language of family reference, as a shared unifying element of Sephardic Jews who consider it the language of love, tenderness and childhood memories, as Sol Genafo a Jewish woman, and classical filologist whose works have focused on issues related to jaquetía, explains in her writings (Genafo, 2020).
Strictly speaking, Haketía cannot be considered a language because for that it should comply with certain requirements that establish criteria for linguistic normalization, such a minimum number of speakers, or the existence of a literary corpus.
Today, it does not meet these criteria. Historically it is considered a language It is difficult to know today the number of Haketía speakers because, as we said, it is a language with a very limited use. The researcher Terhi Silvola-Bendayan (2019) conducted a survey to know first-hand the situation of Haketía and Haketía speakers in the 21st century. Among her conclusions, 92% of respondents said they feel happy to hear someone speaking in Haketía and a similar percentage believed it is a good idea for their descendants to learn
to speak Haketía. Silvila-Bendayan also drew some conclusions that corroborate Genafo’s hypothesis: speaking in this language means for the Sephardic community bringing back the memory of their relatives. The language remains an important part of their identity as it serves as a nostalgic memory. Remembering the language provokes feelings of sadness for an idealized past that has been lost even though, in many cases, the individual may have no personal memory of this past as these were born after their families had emigrated from Morocco. In addition, Haketía is one of the most important symbols and ties to their medieval Hispanic roots and their identity as a people. Other feelings that are aroused is the memory of a deep poverty. This is understood as the result of the stories told by their elders about the hardships lived after the expulsions from Spain in around 15th century and the hard stages of exile and settlement.
2- Was Haketía ever a majority language or culture?
Haketía was never a majority language. Haketía, derived from the Castilian romance language, is the name given to the language that emerged from the Spanish spoken by the Jews settled in the north of Morocco expelled from the Iberian Peninsula from 1492 onwards, after contact with other languages such as Hebrew, Moroccan Dariya, Portuguese, French or even English for those living in the international city of Tangier. In the 15th century, Haketía speakers were already a minority of the Moroccan population in general, but they were also a minority among the Dariya-speaking Moroccan Jews living in Morocco historically, before the arrival of the Sephardim exiled, those Jews who, after the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula, settled in Morocco, instead of in places further east in the Mediterranean like those who did so in territories of the Ottoman Empire whose language is known by the name of Ladino.
3- What were the circumstances that led to the shift from majority to minority?
The progressive loss of this language began in the beginning of the 20th century and the regular contact between the Moroccan Jewish population and those Europeans who settled in the territory during the establishment of the Protectorate over the Alawi Kingdom. If until that time it was the native language of the Jewish community, at that point the Haketía began to suffer a further restriction in its scope of use and remained confined to home use. The reasons through which this restriction of the use of the language are usually explained does not correspond to any specific law, but rather to a the current of thought that extends among the Haketía speaking families at the beginning of the 20th century. Families who had business and close relationship with Spanish and French people start to consider the use of Haketía as a synonym of social retardation associated with traditional labor, or with less economic mobility and stopped teaching this language to their descendants. They believed that abandoning the use of the language of their ancestors would help them to progress socially and economically, hence the number of Haketía speakers was drastically reduced during the central decades of the 20th century.
4- What is the crucial information one should know to have a basic understanding of the major cultural or linguistic features of this community?
The origin of the Haketía speakers’s community in Morocco must be placed around the year 1492CE when the first emigrations of Sephardic Jews to the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar began. Undoubtedly, they came with the cultural heritage from alAndalus: customs, meals, religious modes and of course language. This Hispanic heritage was evident in the populations of northern Morocco, particularly in Tetouan,Tangier, Larache, Alcazarquivir and Arcila, where there were remarkable communities of Sephardic Jews committed to preserving their way of life, but the permeability of the community was inevitable, and the language would be one of the aspects that reflected it most. Thus, time went by forming what we have come to call Haketía. A language with many different influences from those other languages with which it was in contact: Hebrew, Moroccan Dariya, French, Portuguese, English or Greek, and of course, modern Spanish.
HISTORY
1- What is the historical importance of the Haketía language and culture?
The Haketía language has an interesting historical importance because through its knowledge we can also get to know the most significant features of the Jewish communityvthat lived in Sepharad2 until the end of the 15th century when they began to be expelled from Spain and settled in Morocco. Their customs, traditional literature, or the celebration of religious festivities were perfectly tolerated, like María Rosa Menocal, a specialist in Iberian literature at Yale University, claims when she said “tolerance was an inherent aspect of Andalusian society” (2003). Also typical foods, like the Adafina, or the way of establishing social relationships being considered by Islamic authority as dhimmis, or protected non-Muslims, allows us to trace the knowledge of this speech, the vocabulary and grammar. Haketía is a language developed in Morocco from the Castilian Spanish spoken by the expelled Jews or megorashim that already left the Iberian Peninsula influenced by arabisms and hebraisms assimilated during the andalusi period, but that once outside the Iberian Peninsula, in the same way that happened with the Ladino spoken by the Jews who settled in the Ottoman Empire, this Haketía was filled with lexicon, grammatical structures, or expressions from other languages in contact when it became the vernacular language of those jews in north Morocco.
The Hispano-Moroccan War (1859–1860), can be considered a turning point in the evolution of this language, strongly tided to the people that spoke it. After the arrival of the Spaniards in Tetouan in 1859-60, and their settlement in the territory, close contact was established between these Spaniards and the Sephardic descendants who had fled from the Peninsula centuries before. Those Jews had preserved their customs and continued to speak the Castilian language they left with. A language that had suffered several variations that where recognized the Jews realized that what they spoke, the language they believed to be Spanish, was by then far from the Spanish spoken by those newcomers. Almost three centuries later, the language with which the Jews had left the Iberian Peninsula had seen how it kept almost intact the grammatical and phonetic structures of medieval Castilian, while they had added lexicon and Darija syntactic turns
of phrases due to the close contact with this local language. For example, the verb Hadrear, that means ‘to speak.’ It drifts from an Arabic root but ends as a regular Spanish verb from the first conjugation. This situation brought with it some consequences in the evolution of Haketía.
There were those who felt that they were speaking a vulgarized dialect of Spanish and rejected further use of this language, which unfortunately came to be described as ‘bad’ Spanish. Since the end of the 19th century this contempt was one of the causes of the loss of Haketía speakers. As Esther Bendahan explains la haketía es el habla del que huyeron mis padres. No solo ellos, también mis abuelos. Se quedaron en los cajones de nuestra memoria algunas palabras que usábamos con alegría y complicidad (2020).
Kaketía is the way of speaking from which my parents fled. Not only them, but also my grandparents. In the drawers of our memory remained several words that we would use with joy and complicity. By reading her words we understand how, while the use of that speech was publicly rejected, it was kept in the most private sphere as a source of joy and complicity, as the bond that united them with their past and their roots. After the establishment of the Protectorate over the Kingdom of Morocco in 1912, the contacts between Haketía and other languages began to have an impact on the evolution of the language, first of all, because of the contact with Spanish throughout the
northern part of the country, especially in cities such as Tetouan, Chaouen, or Larache.Also French in the southern regions of Morocco, and special cases that we must consider should be the cities of Ceuta, Melilla3 and Tangier. The Spanish enclaves on the North African coast were cities in which a large number of Jewish people lived, so the language there had evolved in a different way, for example, assimilating Spanish loanwords from before. For example, the word jarabullina than means unusual mixture, normally associated with food. Jarabullina might come from the Spanish word Rebujina, drifted form Rebujo.
The most singular case was the city of Tangier. The international city never belonged to either of the two Protectorates settled in Morocco(Spanish and French) but remained as an independent city until 1956, when it became part of the Kingdom of Morocco. In addition, the city since the second half of the 18th century was the diplomatic headquarters of the Kingdom, so the population was used to living among a multifaceted range of nationalities. This, it could not be otherwise, meant that several languages could be heard in the city at the same time, even in the same conversation, and therefore the linguistic reality of Tangier has been complex from then until today. The way in which this affected the evolution of Haketía is very evident, for example, in the vocabulary that the Tangerine Haketía adopted from another language such as Greek, Portuguese, English or even Russian, in a more residual way. An interesting example is the word Preto, for the color black that is an adopted portuguese word. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the emigration of Jews out of Morocco made Haketía practically disappear from the Maghreb country. From then until today the number of Haketía speakers has almost disappeared in the country where it was born. Meanwhile, those Jews who have emigrated, not only to Israel, but also to Venezuela, Canada or Spain, are making great efforts trying to save this singular language that means so much to this community. In the destinations to which the Jews emigrated when leaving Morocco, we can establish a difference. On the one hand, those who settled in Spain were looking for a return to their first background, that is, they wanted to return looking for the family stories they had heard so many times. On the other hand, those who chose destinations in America, especially Canada and Venezuela, went in search of a new future full of promises of richness and peace, since these countries had strong economies and mixed complex societies in which these Jews could fit without problems, just as itactually happened.
2- What are the major foundational works/cultural contributions of the Haketía language? or culture (this can include written works, religious perspectives, technological innovations, archaeological sites, etc.)?
Haketía has been always an oral language. The written manifestations have been very scarce throughout centuries. Being considered the language of intimate and familiar expression, most of the stories and narratives in this language were orally transmitted. Faced with the evidence that this endangered the preservation of the language by progressive abandonment, José Benoliel, one of the first intellectuals to recognize the importance of this language, compiled all the poems and romances that he could. Asking for help from Jews from Tangier, Tetouan and also other European cities where there were communities around the second decade of the 20th century, he came to gather 150 texts. He sent these to Ramón Menéndez Pidal4, so they could be included in the Romancero español, a work than included hundreds of oral poems from Spanish folklore written in Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese, Sefardic, and 150 of them in Haketía. This milestone is very important for the acceptance of Haketía as a Castilian Romance language, because by including it in the Spanish Romancer, Menéndez Pidal was giving it authority as Castilian as well as singularizing it out for its own characteristics.In the few written examples that are preserved, it is important to point out that until the 20th century, most of the preserved ones had been made using the Hebrew alphabet mainly, from then on, the Latin alphabet became more common, as it is still use in our days. This is an important issue as it is crucial for the definitive revitalization of Haketía. A consensus is necessary about the orthographic rules, because until now there is no unanimity on certain aspects, which complicates the learning of the language in the absence of a standard scholars like Alegría Bendaya, Esther Bendahan or Solly Levy are making great efforts in stablishing the Latin alphabet as de definitive one. The use of this alphabet compared to the use of the Hebrew alphabet has a logic that can be explained from phonetic perspective, since Haketía is a language derived from Castilian, the representation of sounds is easier using the Latin alphabet. As a second important contribution by José Benoliel, The Diccionario básico jaquetía-español was the first book based on a study about the Haketía. The work appeared in the Bulletin of the Royal Academy of Spanish Language from 1928 onwards in different volumes of the publication, due to the great interest showed by Menéndez Pidal, after the publication of the poems included in the Romancero Español. Benoliel’s work became titanic because all the compilation and writing work had been carried out simply with the effort of his memory since there was not enough writing material to use, as he himself explained in the introduction: reunir y coordinar los elementos necesarios a mi estudio, sin más recurso que mi memoria, embotada y ofuscada por más de cincuenta años de residencia en países donde ni se habla español ni de nombre es conocida la Hakitía. Despite his own doubts about the work he was about to undertake, the Diccionario básico jaquetía-español is still today one of the most important contributions to the knowledge and conservation of Haketía. In 1977, a facsimile edition was made and since then it has been considered an essential foundational work. Other important works that deal with the historical study, grammatical and phonetic characteristics as well as including vocabulary glossaries are those by Alegría Bendayan de Bendelac, among which we can highlight Voces jaquetiscas, published in 1990. The work done by Jacobo Israel Garzón, Lengua y literatura oral del Judeo-español de Marruecos o Jaquetía, published in 2017. Also noteworthy are the contributions made by the philologist Yaakob Bentolila, as well as the works published by Solly Levy such as Mi vida en Haketía (2012), a publication that includes 5 CDs in which Levy collects stories and knowledge all recorded in Haketía. Further, Levy is the author of what is considered the first literary work entirely written in this language: Yaḥasrà, published in Québec in 1992. In 2008, he also published El libro de Selomó, considered the second work ever published in Haketía, which was followed by El segundo libro de Selomó in 2014. These two last novels are partly considered pseudo-autobiographical narrate the life of a Jew born in Tetouan.
In addition to these works, we have to take into account the literary works La vida perra de Juanita Narboni and El mazal de los pobres, two novels that although they are not written entirely in Haketía, do include words and expressions in this language and stand out for their uniqueness and literary value, as well as being a fundamental tool to know in depth the Haketía speaker community, as this books reflect with great fidelity customs, traditions and even cooking recipes that bring us closer to that lost reality. Professor Francisco Moscoso considers La vida perra de Juanita Narboni by Angel Vazquez (1976 1st ed.) and El mazal de los pobres by Elie Benchetrit (2017) two literary treasures. El mazal de los pobres is a novel written in Spanish but in which the dialogues and some fragments are in Haketía. Benchetrir narrates the life in the international city of Tangier of the 50s and 60s as he remembers it. We can draw some important conclusions from this novel. Since the city of Tangier never had a mellah (Jewish quarter), there were areas of the neighborhoods in which a greater number of Jews lived. Thus, in Tangier the majority were divided between Fuente Nueva, where Benchetrit grew up, the Bulevar
Pasteur area, Tetuán street and the wealthiest in Marchan. What this novel shows us is that in this internal division of the Jews within the city of Tangier there were also differences that were recognized in their way of speaking Haketía. It is surprising if we think about the number of speakers we are dealing with, in this case a community that in the decade between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s dropped from about 18,000 to 4,000 Jews. This supports the fact that Haketía was essentially a familial language and that it evolved according to the environment that each one had, also important to the survival of the languages was the difficulty to learn it since it was, and still is, only use in private environment what made almost impossible to learn it. Jacobo Israel Garzón explains that this difference was appreciated in the pronunciation, as the version spoken around the Fuente Nueva, inside the medina of Tangier, was the most classical. When moving towards the boulevard a re-Hispanization could be appreciated, and the pronunciation was closer to the andalusian accent. And lastly, going up towards the Marchan, the Haketía became frenchified in aspects like the vocabulary they incorporated. We can read a fragment of the novel in which a Jew from Fuente Nueva speaks to Rubén el de los buñuelos: Güeno está de ḥadras, Robén, qaddea de una vez y faddea con tu trabasho, que sino mos tienes aquí hasta la hora de minhá. To the novel, La vida perra de Juanita Narboni by the tangierian writer Ángel Vázquez, is a reckless and confused portrait of the city of Tangier during the middle decades of the 20th century. The story of Juanita, the protagonist, falls in parallel to that of the city of Tangier itself, which moves towards its nationalization and, therefore, the loss of the internationalization that characterized it. The structure of the novel is a monologue in which Juanita speaks constantly, almost like a stream of water that flows without a dam that stops it. In the brief introduction that precedes the novel, the author explains that his intention in writing it was to record her memories, to try to reflect as faithfully as possible the speech and customs of tangerine women like his mother and her Jewish friends. Thus, this work is also another of those treasures that we mentioned, since Juanita’s speech is fully plagued with Haketía terms through we can learn about the customs and habits of the Jews in the International city. We read a fragment of the uninterrupted text of Juanita Narboni full of terms in Haketía:
(…) Te veía venir. Como siempre. Yo también te saludo, mi reina, se te caiga el massaj. Una vez te pedí veinte duros y no quisiste dejármelos. Claro me saludas por cuestión de Prestige. Al fin y al cabo, una es una Narboni (…) Estoy bien mi buen, gracias. Mejorado te veas como yo me veo. Eso, ahora provócame. Para qué me preguntará eso esta bastarda, si sabe que no tengo un céntimo? (…)
3- The importance of the association of Haketía with Judaism.
The connection between Judaism and Haketía is full, since, as we have been pointing out, this language was spoken by the Jews who settled in Morocco after the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula from the 15th century onwards. A way to certify this union is by consulting the glossaries of Haketía where we find a large amount of vocabulary related to religious rites, festivities, or traditional clothing. Here are some examples of vocabulary from Benoliel’s work, as well as expressions and set phrases taken from Voces jaquetiscas by Alegría Bendayan.
Vocabulary
Àaberá: (from Hebrew) Sin, violation of a precept.
Àaborá: Religious worship service. Worship of God.
Àarbit: (from Hebrew) Twilight prayer.
Adafina: (from Arabic) Traditional dish eaten on Saturdays
Alaafu: (from Arabic). God forgive us and save us from anything.
Arreboso: Scarf to cover women’s head.
Arrescobdarse: Lean back on the left elbow to eat the bocados on the first two nights of
Pesach.
Bocados: Piece of certain vegetables that the family’s father distributes among the guests
during the first two nights of Pesach.
Crinches: false hair covering the forehead. It is placed under the headscarf that covers the
head of married Jewish women.
Deshamezzar –To remove the hamés, everything that is unleavened. Many days before Pesach it is obligatory to do a general cleaning throughout the house, leaving no corner or piece of furniture without searching, washing and cleaning, in case there is any trace
of hidden unleavened dough, that is, a crumb of bread, a grain of wheat, the least dust of flour, until the eve of Pesah, the day on which are burned as many pieces of bread as rooms are in the house, as a demonstration that everything possible has been done to destroy the hamés, and in fulfillment of the precept: “Y que no sea visto hamés en tu morada”.
Dío: God.
Escuchado: The children are tested on Thursdays to hear the Sabbath reading recitation
of the of the Pentateuch.
Esnoga: Synagogue.
Finojo: Fennel. Herb used in the Rosh Haxaná, the New Year ceremony.
Fiuzia: Faith.
Habla: Word used by custom when a wife does not address her husband by his name, but
rather by saying ¡Habla!
Hazer una àaberá: To commit a sin.
Hamdear: (from Arabic) To Give thanks to God.
Haxak: (from Arabic) God save you from that!
Káfer: (from Arabic) Atheist, unbeliever, traitor, renegade.
Káfer billáh: (from Arabic) The one who denies God.
Kasér or Kaxér: (from Hebrew) What is allowed for food by law.
Lorez al-Dio: Praise to God.
Lillah: (from Arabic) For God’s sake!
Mellah: Jewish quarter in Morocco
Mezuzero: (from Hebrew) Mezuzah case.
Qadmear: (from Arabic) To Invoke only in the name of God.
Yedallah: (from Arabic) Help. Literally “hand of God”.
Òomer: (from Arabic) The time between Pesach and Pentecost.
Expressions or Idioms
Lo mire el Dío y se apiade: Expression of faith, anguish and resignation that is used when some minor misfortune occurs. It is also said to censure someone who commits blunders or insists on continuing with reprehensible behavior. Lo nuestro/Los nuestros: Expression use by the Sephardic Jews of northern Morocco to identify the set of beliefs, customs and values by which they are governed. Lo nuestro is the term by which they represent themselves, the descendants of those expelled from Spain who speak Haketía and have preserved the ancestral traditions. Use to distinguish themselves from the rest of the population of Morocco, like Muslims or Jews from the
south of Morocco. Loores al Dío/al Señor/a mi Señor: Expression of faith and gratitude to God for what has been received
LANGUAGE FEATURES
1- What are the major linguistic features?
The grammatical system of the Haketía is mostly the Castilian one since the language was born from the spoken by the Spanish Jews in the 15th century. The loans and adoptions are, to a great extent, limited to vocabulary and idioms. Since Haketía is eminently an oral language its writing system is not fixed, which means that we find different ways of representing those phonemes that vary from Spanish if they are borrowed from Hebrew or Moroccan Arabic mostly. In these cases, each of the authors who have written in Haketía have proposed a writing system to be able to read certain letters with the correct pronunciation. The first of them, as we have already indicated, was José Benoliel’s Dictionary. He created a detailed transcription system that helps its knowledge. When in 1977 Garzon Serfaty edited Benoliel’s Dictionary of Haketía, he carried out a brief study that introduces us to the phonetic system of Haketía and its graphic representation following Benoliel’s system.
Sound Patterns
Of the thirty-one consonant and vowel sounds identified by Benoliel, nine of them are different from Spanish. The phonemes that interest us the most are the following:
1. The G in words from Arabic origin is pronounced like غ) gain) or like a French R. It is written in italics to differentiate it from the g when has a Spanish pronunciation. As in gzal, gzala: Young endowed with beauty.
2. The aspirated H that is pronounced like the French H or the Hebrew ה) he). As in the word of Arabic origin hadra: Conversation, gossip.
3. The Semitic H which is pronounced like the Hebrew ח) het) or the Arabic ح) ḥa). It is either a loud aspirated sound or a soft Spanish J. Like the Andalusian J. Benoliel writes it in italics to differentiate it from the previous one. We can also find it written as ḥ. For example, in the Arabic word hram: sin, illicit, forbidden
4. The J that is pronounced like the French J. He writes it in italics to differentiate it from the Spanish j. For example, the word jaqueta: jacket
5. The Semitic Q that is pronounced emphasized like the Hebrew (quf) ק or the Arabic (qaf) ق .We have to distinguish this consonant from the Spanish Q which is followed by /u/ before the vowels /e/ or /i/. With the vowels /a/, /o/ and /u/, Benoliel uses the consonant K, widely used in the usual transcriptions of Haketía. For example, Káfer: atheist, unbeliever, traitor, renegade.
6. The V that is always pronounced like its French equivalent, except for words of Hebrew origin that is pronounced like the Hebrew ו) vav). For example, vazzio: empty.
7. The X that is always pronounced as sh. Therefore, equivalent to the Arabic ش (shin). Xabon, soap, pronounced shabón. Xabonar, to wash, pronounced shabonar.
8. The Z that will always be pronounced like the French Z. For example, in words like onze (eleven), doze (twelve). Very often intervocalic S is changed to Z, as in mozotros instead of nosotros.
9. The ع’ ayin, pronounced like its equivalent in classical Hebrew and Arabic. Benoliel puts it as the last entry in his dictionary and represents it with a grave accent on the corresponding doubled vowel to indicate a lengthening. This is what happens in the words Èeden: Eden, or Òolam: world.
In addition to these consonants that represent a variation from the Castilian of origin,
based on the work carried out by Professor Fanciscon Moscoso (2020), we can highlight
other characteristic features:
1. Vowel changes such as /o/ for /u/ in modern Spanish: abondara for abundara (abound).
Also, the presence of the /i/ in the place of the /e/ due to the influence of dialectal Arabic.
Although as Professor Moscoso points out, this is also a common feature of Andalusian,
therefore, the contact in this case is double. Examples would be, biñuelos for buñuelos
(fritter); Pilíkula for Película (film), or Mirinda for Merienda (snack). In this last
example we also find another usual feature: the diphthong /ie/ will always be only /i/.
2- A very characteristic feature in the change between some consonants: from N to M and
from M to B. For example, mozotros for nosotros (us), or baldición for maldición
(malediction).
3- The consonantal sound L, especially in the cases of the article, disappears, but doubles the consonant it precedes when they are: N, R or D, in the most common cases. This is due to the indisputable influence of the reduplication of the article in Arabic before the so-called solar letters: er-regalo (the gift)
Stress
in Haketía also has its own rules since the words are only agudas, llanas or unstressed. Even if the words are taken from other languages rather than spanish, the tendency in Haketía is towards this word stress. There are no esdrújulas or sobreesdrújulas words, they become agudas: lampará, Malagá, fabricá. Professor Moscoso points out that, although the stress of words of Castilian origin is usually respected, when they are used with the intention of emphasizing that word or in questions, the accentuation varies by making them agudo (we represent them with a lengthening of the vowel to mark pronunciation): ¿Adondee iremoos? (Where shall we go?).
Intonation
is perhaps one of the most distinctive features when listening to Haketi. It is a language that we could define as musical, a singing and joyful language. We can still hear this characteristic sonority of Haketía in a very residual way in some older speakers of this language.
As for the morphosyntactic features, we must dwell on the conjugations of verbs and plurals. Although in Haketía there are three conjugations of the verbs like in Spanish, due to the aforementioned change of the vowel /e/ in /i/, most of the verbs of the second conjugation are grouped in the third conjugation. On the other hand, in Haketía we find numerous verbs borrowed from Hebrew and dialectal Arabic that are Spanishized by grouping them in the first conjugation: ḥadrear, means to speak. Atauilar, tidy up, put in order. When conjugating them, for example, in the present tense, a /y/ is added to the first person at the end. According to Solly Levy, the explanation he finds for this is that the addition responds to assimilation with the conjugated verbs: voy (I go), soy (I am), estoy (I am). Therefore, yo hablo (I speak) in Haketía would be: yo habloy, and yo digo (I say) is yo digoy. The issue of plurals is also special in this language. As Cuevas Ramos explains in her research work (2016), the most significant features can be summarized as follows: The plural of all words from Castilian, French or Portuguese origin are made following the rules of plurals in Spanish with two exceptions: 1- When the word ends in Z it is not changed to C to make /-ces/, but rather maintains the Z: vez (time), plural vezes. 2- The words that end in S, change said S for a Z: mes (month) plural mezes. Arabic loanwords will also take this plural ending: mesqín (poor)- plural mesqínes. For words of Hebrew origin, it maintains the regular Hebrew plurals: /-im/ for the masculine and /-ot/ for the feminine. For example, Goy (nation, town) whose plural is Goyím.
CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES AND FUTURE CHALLENGES AND
OPPORTUNITIES.
1- What is the future of the Haketía language and culture? What are the main challenges?
Despite the fact that during the second half of the 20th century it seemed that Haketía was doomed to disappear due to a drastic decline in speakers, when only the elderly people were left, dying and taking their knowledge of this language with them, at this point in the 21st century it seems that we can be more hopeful. The efforts by descendants of Haketía speakers for the recovery and conservation of this language have been unsuccessful in some cases. Just as José Benoliel, already in the twenties of the 20th century, said that he had made his Dictionary only using his memory, many of the efforts made in recent decades are the result of personal efforts to make Haketía survive. However, these efforts have found an echo in some institutions that have understood the importance of the conservation and dissemination of this language, not only because of the knowledge of the language itself, but also because of the repercussion that this has on the conservation of heritage. Sephardic culture would otherwise lose part of its legacy forever. The main challenge today is to increase the number of speakers in order for the language to last over time. If it is recovered as a mother tongue, even if it is only at the family level as it always was, the language will be alive. First of all, we understand that it is essential to find a writing consensus to be able to unify the texts that have been published in recent times, but that in the absence of such consensus they are individual efforts that do not give stability to the language, in addition to hindering its learning. The orthographic standardization would be the first objective that those who today are contributing great efforts for the conservation of Haketía should have. Social networks and the different websites that we can find on the internet are good allies for the conservation of this language. There are several institutions that have launched activities focused on this, from which people anywhere in the world can benefit as long as they have access to the internet. For example, eSefarad, Sephardic world news site https://esefarad.com/?p=25095 . Also, the Center for Sephardic Studies and its website, sefardiweb, where numerous conservation and dissemination works are carried out on this language http://www.proyectos.cchs.csic.es/sefardiweb/node/23.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY
For undergraduate students
1- What languages were spoken in al-Andalus (8th-15th century) and how do these contribute to the origin of Haketía?
2- Research the main cities where Jews expelled from Spain settled: Tetouan, Asila, Tangier, Melilla, Ceuta, etc. Through their history we can also learn about the history of the Jewish community and thus deepen our knowledge of their traditions and of course, the language.
3- What are the differences between the Jews from Spain who came to Morocco and the Moroccan Jews? Focus on the differences in traditions, habits and language.
4- What is the current situation of the Moroccan Jewish population?
5- Which are the main literary works in Haketía?
For advanced or graduate students
1- Carry out a detailed survey to know approximate the number of speakers of the language today. Such a survey can be made using the information networks of the Sephardic cultural centers around the world.
2- Propose a standardization for the orthography of Haketía. In your proposal, explain the issues involved in the standardization and reason your proposal. How would your proposal best serve the language and why?
3- Which alphabet should be used for Haketía, Hebrew or Latin? Why?
4- Investigate the linguistic situation of other Ibero-Jewish communities around the world such as in Canada or Venezuela? How are they maintaining their language? Elaborate on the linguistic challenges specific to those communities.