Judeo-Spanish evolved abroad while Morisco Spanish died quickly overseas

Evidence

An illuminating parallel to bear in mind here, and one that has survived (just) into modern times, is that of written Judeo-Spanish, to which some allusion has already been made. Sephardic Jews, in writing their Spanish vernacular, turned to the Hebrew alphabet as a banner of their cultural and religious distinctiveness. The parallel is far from perfect, because the fifteenth-century Castilian that Sephardic Jews took into their exile has, over the half millennium they have passed outside the Iberian Peninsula, continued to evolve in highly interesting ways, partly in response to the internal linguistic dynamics of the Romance dialects in question, partly as a consequence of fresh contacts outside the Iberian Peninsula with the languages of their hosts, partly as a result of the cultural influence of French on them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To these various non-Hispanic, exotic features of the modern Sephardic vernaculars there are no Islamic Spanish parallels, of course. Morisco Spanish was an exclusively peninsular phenomenon, and it died off very soon after it was exported to North Africa, but what is relevant for us here is that the Jews both in Spain, before their expulsion, and in the Sephardic diaspora after it, also employed their new written mode of expression in translations of the scriptures, for some devotional purposes, and above all in Bible commentaries (as in that great Biblical enterprise, the Meam Loez). — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 657

Categorization

• XREF: Parallel written-language-as-identity case contrasts with the aljamiado case from the prior paragraph; exemplifies script as cultural banner.