Aljamiado

A text in a Romance language is said to be aljamiado if it is written using the Arabic or the Hebrew alphabets, as texts written in the Mozarabic or Ladino languages are.

In their latest times, Moriscos had lost Arabic as an everyday language, and wrote in Spanish language on Islamic subjects. Examples are the Coplas del alhichante (about a hajj) or the Libro de Yuçuf on the Biblical Joseph (dreamer).

In Bosnia, Slavic Muslims wrote their Bosnian texts using the Arabic alphabet.

Texts in the Arabic script are often written without short vowels, making these texts more difficult to read; for Aljamiado as for Arabic, the reader was expected to supply the missing vowels.

In Spanish, aljama means the quarters where Jews or Mudejars lived

External links

• A bilingual Arabic-aljamiado Quran from the fifteenth century
• Aljamiado (Texts and Studies)