Juhuri, Juwuri or Judæo-Tat (çuhuri / жугьури / ז'אוּהאוּראִ) is the traditional language of the Mountain Jews of the eastern Caucasus Mountains, especially Azerbaijan and Dagestan, now mainly spoken in Israel.

The language is related to Persian; it belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian division of the Indo-European languages. The Tat language, a similar, but still different language is spoken by the Muslim Tats of Azerbaijan, a group to which the Mountain Jews were mistakenly considered to belong during the era of Soviet historiography. The words Juhuri and Juhuro literally translate as "Jewish" and "Jews."

Juhuri has Semitic (Hebrew/Aramaic/Arabic) elements on all linguistic levels. Juhuri has the Hebrew sound "ayin" (ע) while no neighbouring languages have it.

Juhuri is an endangered language classified as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

The language is presently spoken by an estimated 106,000 people:

In the early 20th century Juhuri used the Hebrew script. In the 1920s the Latin script was adapted for it; later it was written in Cyrillic. Recently, the use of the Hebrew alphabet has enjoyed renewed popularity.




This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juhuri_language

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