Judeo-Tat

Judeo-Tat or Juhuri (Cuhuri, Жугьури, ז׳אוּהאוּראִ) is a Judeo-Persian dialect of the Tat language historically spoken by the Mountain Jews, primarily in Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and today in Israel. It belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian division of the Indo-European languages with heavy influence from the Hebrew language. In the era of Soviet historiography, the Mountain Jews were mistakenly considered to be related to the Muslim Tats of Azerbaijan. However, they do not share a common linguistic heritage, as the Mountain Jews kept their native language (which itself was derived from their ancestors adopting Persian at an earlier date), while the Muslim Tats eventually adopted contemporary Persian. The words Juvuri and Juvuro translate as "Jewish" and "Jews".

Judeo-Tat features Semitic elements in all linguistic levels of the language. Uniquely, Judeo-Tat retains the voiced pharyngeal approximant, also known as ayin (ع/ע), a phoneme whose presence is considered to be a hallmark of Semitic languages such as Arabic and no longer found in Modern Hebrew; no neighbouring languages in Azerbaijan or Dagestan feature it.

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

Distribution
The language is spoken by an estimated 101,000 people:
 * Israel: 70,000 in 1998
 * Azerbaijan: 24,000 in 1989
 * Russia: 2,000 in 2010
 * United States: 5,000
 * Canada 2,500

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

Influences and etymology
Judeo-Tat is a dialect of the Southwest Iranian language family, which includes Persian. Compared to other Iranian languages spoken in the Caucasus [for example, Talysh, Ossetian, and Kurdish], Judeo-Tat has more similarities to modern Persian. Howeverer, it also bears strong influence from other sources:

Medieval Persian: Postpositions are used predominantly in lieu of prepositions, for example in modern Persian: باز او > Judeo-Tat æ uræ-voz "with him/her".

Arabic: like in modern Persian, a significant portion of the vocabulary is Arabic in origin. Unlike modern Persian, Judeo-Tat has almost universally retained the original pharyngeal/uvular phonemes of Arabic, for example "honey" (Arab. عسل),  "morning" (Arab. صباح).

Hebrew: As in other Jewish dialects, the language also has many Hebrew loanwords, for example "table" (Heb.  shulḥan),  "luck" (Heb.  mazal),  "rich" (Heb.  ʻashir). Hebrew words are typically pronounced in the tradition of other Mizrahi Jews. Examples: and  are pronounced pharyngeally (like Arabic ح&lrm;, ع respectively);  is pronounced as a voiced uvular plosive (like Persian ق/غ). Classical Hebrew  and  (kamatz), however, are typically pronounced as /v/ and /o/ respectively (similar to the Persian/Ashkenazi traditions, but unlike the Iraqi tradition, which retains  and )

Azerbaijani: Vowel harmony and many loan words

Russian: Loanwords adopted after the Russian Empire's annexation of Daghestan and Azerbaijan

Northeast Caucasian languages: "small" (probably the same origin as the medieval Caucasian city name "Sera-chuk" mentioned by Ibn Battuta, meaning "little Sera")

Other common phonology/morphology changes from classical Persian/Arabic/Hebrew:
 * > /o/, /æ/, or /u/ as in "book" (Arab. كتاب),  "road/path" (Pers. راه rāh),  "sacrifice" (Arab., Aramaic  or Heb.  Korban)
 * /o/ > /u/ as in "Absalom" (Heb.  Abshalom)
 * /u/ > /y/, especially under the influence of vowel harmony
 * Stress on final syllable words
 * Dropping of the final /n/ as in /soχtæ/ "to make" (Pers. ساختن sākhtan)

Dialects
Being a variety of the Tat language, Judeo-Tat itself can be divided into several dialects: The dialects of Oğuz (formerly Vartashen) and the now extinct Jewish community of Mücü have not been studied well and thus cannot be classified.
 * Quba dialect (traditionally spoken in Quba and Qırmızı Qəsəbə).
 * Derbent dialect (traditionally spoken in the town of Derbent and the surrounding villages).
 * Kaitag dialect (spoken in the North Caucasus).