J̌udi
Judeo-Shirazi
- Glottocode: olds1251
Judeo-Shirazi is a Southwest Iranian language spoken by the Jewish community of Shiraz, even while most of the non-Jewish population shifted to Persian. The large Jewish Shirazi population in New York may number as many as 4,000, many in the heavily Jewish area of Midwood, Brooklyn, where they have several synagogues. An estimated more than 1000 Shirazi Jews also live in the suburb of Great Neck near other Persian Jews. In New York, Judeo-Shirazi appears to be a largely moribund language, spoken only among the elderly and in the most intimate situations. Speaker Manuchehr Kohanbash, for example, speaks his mother tongue only with his brothers, but not with his wife, who is not from Shiraz, nor with his children. Persian has become the principal language of communication, with literacy in the Persian script, and the younger generation shifting to English. Religious literature in the community, as in other Persian Jewish communities, was formerly in Judeo-Persian, a variety of Persian (not the Judeo-Shirazi vernacular) written in Hebrew script. According to 2015-2019 American Community Survey data, there are roughly 6,693 Persian speakers in Great Neck and surrounding towns, the overwhelming majority of whom are probably Jewish, and a small number of whom are probably speakers of these quite different languages spoken by regional Jewish communities in Iran.
Sites
NYC neighborhoods or towns in the metro region where the language community has a significant site, marked by a point on the map: