Contact Induced Processes of Language Change in Spoken Twenty-First Century Judeo-Spanish in Turkey.

The aim of the lecture is to examine the extent of ongoing language change in Judeo-Spanish as a result of contact-induced processes, in particular of Turkification and Re-Romancisation. The analysis regarding the lexicon, the morphology and the syntax of 21^st century Judeo-Spanish is based on a corpus of spoken Judeo-Spanish consisting of more than 50 narrative interviews, which were conducted during a five-month period of field research (October 2015 – February 2016) in Istanbul and Izmir. The focus of the comparison between my collected corpus and data of 20^th century Judeo-Spanish will lie on linguistic features. Those lexical and grammatical structures indicating processes of language change in Judeo-Spanish will form the core of the comparison, which is supposed to answer the following questions:

• To what extent does spoken 21^st century Judeo-Spanish still show lexical, semantical, morphological and syntactical borrowings from Turkish?
• Which lexical and grammatical units show a higher grade of influence of Modern Romance Languages, in particular of Castilian?
• If the frequency of Castilian elements – compared with the Judeo-Spanish lexicon, morphology and syntax of the 20^th century – increases, does the recent rise of Castilian borrowings indicate a language change of Judeo-Spanish as a result of Castilian as a recent contact language of Judeo-Spanish?

The lecture will conclude with an overview of the status quo of spoken Judeo-Spanish nowadays in the Sephardic communities of Istanbul and Izmir.