Minority religions rebuilt Spanish as distinct languages to reject Christian cultural hegemony

Evidence

Parallel with aljam´ıa, this “Biblical” variety of Judeo-Spanish (for which the term “Ladino” is best reserved) is a new Hispanic Romance language reconstructed on Semitic models. Ladino is preeminently a language of linguistic calques, but they are calques based on Hebrew on the imitation of Hebrew grammar using Spanish materials, whereas Islamic Spanish (aljamiado) texts were built on Semitic but Arabic models. Ladino also would provide a further illustration of the phenomenon of linguistic divergence motivated by cultural isolation. It is an example of the rejection by non-Christians of the cultural hegemony of “Christian” (Latinate) Spanish models. We see among the Sephardim a similar desire to cultivate a distinctive community identity through their control of their language and literature. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 658

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the broader Islamic Spanish/aljamía theme of the book and to Jewish diaspora linguistics (Judeo-Spanish) as parallel divergences from Latinate Spanish.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the precise distinction between Ladino (Hebrew-modeled calques) and aljamiado (Arabic-modeled) as parallel Semitic reconstructions of Spanish.