oa La muerte del ladino escrito en Al-Andalús

The Christian community in Moslem Spain was mostly bilingual in speech (ladino and Arabic) throughout, but around the end of the ninth century they seem to have decided to become literate in Arabic alone. This paper suggests that part of the motivation for ceasing to write in the traditional way lay precisely in the attempts of the Cordoba scholars of the 850s to extend the level of their traditional culture ; in the event, rather than (as has often been said) leading to a higher level of Latinity, their attempts snapped the tenuous thread that was still linking the registers of colloquial speech and traditional written techniques within a monolingual whole. The effect of this dissociation in Carolingian France was to create a new and conscious conceptual distinction between Latin and Romance, but in Moslem Spain it was much easier in practice to stop writing in the Roman alphabet altogether and remain ladino-speaking but only literate (if at all) in Arabic.