Judeo-Gascon is a sociolect of the Gascon language, formerly spoken among the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who settled during the 16th century in the cities of Bordeaux, Bayonne and in the south-west part of Landes of Gascony (most notably in Peyrehorade and Bidache). Judeo-Gascon, as Judeo-Provençal, the other major Jewish sociolect of Occitan, is now practically extinct.

Until recently, Judeo-Gascon was probably one of the least known dialects of Gascon and Occitan and the least studied from a linguistic point of view. Its first coverage in scholarship has been in Nahon (2017); its linguistic characteristics have been investigated in depth in Nahon (2018), alongside comprehensive critical editions of the surviving Judeo-Gascon texts.

After the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, some Iberian Jews, who were originally speakers of Portuguese and/or Spanish, settled in the South-West of France in Gascon-speaking areas. In the course of time, these Jews were linguistically assimilated to their Gascon-speaking environment, though Spanish was kept, alongside Hebrew, as a written language for administrative, liturgical, and literary purposes.

The variety of Gascon spoken by the Jews, in a situation of diglossia with these languages, received a strong linguistic imprint that caused it to diverge from the Gascon dialects spoken by the coterritorial Christian populations. Additional influences of Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Provençal and Western Yiddish occurred too, due to immigration of Jews from other communities to Gascony.^[1]

Judeo-Gascon was still spoken in the early 20th century but disappeared quickly after the Second World War.^[2]

It was superseded by a variety of French that retains a large number of lexical and morphological influences from Judeo-Gascon.^[3] This variety of French with Judeo-Gascon substrate is still spoken nowadays by a few dozens of speakers, some of which still know a few sentences in Judeo-Gascon.^[4]

The main phonetic feature of Judeo-Gascon, especially its Bayonne variety, is the realization as [e] of stressed and unstressed /e/, in contrast with its [œ] realization in the surrounding Western Gascon (also called gascon negue). This has been attributed by Nahon as an influence from the inland dialects or diglossia with Spanish.^[5]

The most prominent feature of Judeo-Gascon is the high influx of loanwords from Hebrew, Spanish and Portuguese, adapted to the phonology of Gascon.^[6]

Hebrew loanwords include cheman Israël 'goodness!' (Hebr. šema yisrael), haroche or harocho ‘disgusting, unpleasant’ (Hebr. ḥaroset charoset), vécimento ‘blessed!’ (Hebr. besiman ṭob ‘in a good omen’), sabbat ‘Saturday’ (Hebr. šabbat). Ibero-Romance loanwords include enridou ‘tangle’ (Sp./Port. enredo), bobou ‘stupid’, amoundeguille 'meat ball' (Sp. albondiguilla), and many others.^[6]

Most texts written in Judeo-Gascon date from the 19th and early 20th century. The only known earlier material are a few 18th-century Gascon nicknames borne by Jews in Gascony.^[7] All the other documents have been published and commented by Nahon. They include:

• three pieces of para-liturgical poetry, sang at the occasion of the Purim holiday. Two of them have been collected orally by Nahon in the 2010s, and are the last surviving specimens of Judeo-Gascon oral literature.^[8]
• several satirical works in verse and prose, including an important satire composed in 1837 for the inauguration of the main synagogue of Bayonne
• a Jewish holiday calendar (Calende yudiu) dated 1928, the last printed work in Judeo-Gascon.^[9]
• private correspondence.

• Spanish and Portuguese Jews
• Gascony