Home  / 2474

Language and identity among the Sephardim in the Territory of the former Yugoslavia

Author(s)

Publication Name

Publication Date

Publication Place

Publisher

Abstract

In this paper, the question of importance of Judeo--Spanish as the means for maintaining ethnic identity among the Sephardim in the territories of former Yugoslavia is investigated through an analysis of articles dedicated to the topic published in El amigo del puevlo (a Judeo-Spanish periodical which first was published in Serbia, and then in Bulgaria), fragments from the books by Angel Pulido, Los israelitas espanoles y el idioma castellano (Madrid 1904) and Espanoles sin patria y la raza sefardi (Madrid 1905),as well as unpublished documents from the Archive of Serbia and the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.The present analysis suggests that a specific language ideology(negative attitudes towards the minority language in question) has played a crucial role in language shift in favor of the majority languages in the region (which has not jeopardized the concept of ethnic identity and membership), thus supporting findings by other authors(e.g., Myhill 2004, Weis 2000) that the maintenance of ethnic identity among Jews over the centuries has often been strengthened bycultural (religious, traditional, literary, etc.) rather than linguistic criteria. From the theoretical standpoint, this research clearly supports the view that the construction of ethnicity and ethnic identity should be viewed as a complex process in which different factors (language being only one of them) have different values and saliency at different points in time (e.g., see Fishman 1989; 1999)

Topics

Editor

Genre

Geographic Coverage

Original Language

Page Number / Article Number

303-318

Link

PDF (via academia.edu), Language and identity among the Sephardim in the Territory of the former Yugoslavia

Bibliographic Information

Filipović, Jelena, Vučina Simović, Ivana Language and identity among the Sephardim in the Territory of the former Yugoslavia. The Romance Balkans: Collection of papers presented at the international conferenceThe Romance Balkans, 4–6 November 2006. Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. 2008: 303-318.  https://archive.jpr.org.uk/object-2474