Judeo-Spanish (also
Judaeo-Spanish and Judæo-Spanish: ,
Hebrew script: ,
Cyrillic: ), commonly referred to as
Ladino, is a
Romance language derived from
Old Spanish. During the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries Judeo-Spanish blossomed into a language of journalism and popular literature, resulting in a bibliography of almost four hundred periodical titles and a corpus of novels, theatrical plays, poems, and other minor genres. Originally spoken in the former territories of the
Ottoman Empire (the
Balkans,
Turkey, the
Middle East, and
North Africa) as well as in
France,
Italy,
Netherlands,
Morocco, and the
UK, today it is spoken mainly by
Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, most of the speakers residing in
Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a
minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Spain, Turkey and France.