Preface and acknowledgments

I started working on the topic of this book thirty years ago, shortly after I returned to Israel and began to think about the multilingual society I was again living in. A first paper broached the field for me, and exposed me to the challenge of studying the sociolinguistic ecology of no longer existing communities. That was my first attempt at historical sociolinguistics; there were further essays in the genre within two later books, The Languages of Jerusalem and The Languages of Israel. The present book seems to me a natural next step, filling in the gaps between the history in the former and the contemporary survey in the latter.

The title should make it clear that I am going beyond the concern with Jewish languages (such as Yiddish and Ladino), the study of which was opened seriously by Max Weinreich and has been continued by a large group of scholars (they appear on the website www.jewish-languages.org), to ask about any of the “co-territorial” varieties – as Weinreich called them – that have become the vernacular or standard languages used by Jewish communities. This perspective will challenge me to consider when a variety adopted and used by Jews has been sufficiently modified to justify calling it a “Jewish language”.