Judeo-Berber Language

Judeo-Berber Language

Judeo-Berber (Berber: Tamazight Tudayt, Hebrew: יהודית ברברית‎) is a term used primarily for the Berber varieties traditionally spoken by the Jewish communities of certain parts of central and southern Morocco. Speakers emigrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. While mutually comprehensible with the Tamazight spoken by most inhabitants of the area (Galand-Pernet et al. 1970:14), these dialects are distinguished by the use of Hebrew loanwords and the pronunciation of š as s (as in many Jewish Moroccan Arabic dialects).