The Israeli Bar website is available in Hebrew, Arabic and English,which is not surprising, but it also has a Spanish section. Any reason why? Lots of Spanish lawyers in Israel?
Well, there are the Sephardi Jews of the Iberian Peninsula.
Yes. Don’t they speak a pigdin of which Spanish is just a part?
I know there’s been a pretty big population of Argentinian Jews, and between anti-semitism and discriminatory policies during the military government, and some terrorist attacks in the 2000s, a bunch moved to Israel.
Not a pidgin, more like yet another romance language - it’s closer to medieval Spanish than to modern Spanish. There is a program in Ladino in Radio 3 and one in RNE Internacional, I can understand what they say. Jews are good at preserving things when they’re allowed to.
The description in the RNEi webpage looks like someone was trying to spell things phonetically (“kultural”? R U srious?), but I don’t know whether that’s the case or whether there were any good sources for written Ladino prior to the 20th century.
Ladino is spoken in Israel, but like Yiddish, it’s a dying language. My in-laws speak it, and my wife can understand it, but it won’t be going any further than that - and I don’t think it’s beng spoken as a mother tongue anywhere in the world. Which is too bad, because unlike Yiddish, it’s a beautiful language to listen to.
That aside, there aren’t that many actual Spanish speakers in Israel, at least not compared to the Russian and French speakers. I have no idea why the Bar Association has a Spanish option and not those two languages.
WAG: they use onsite translators and happened to have one with Spanish. I’ve seen that done before, a company with almost not business in German but hey, the receptionist spoke German so…
Which languages would a website of a body which deals heavily with the public, would you reasonably expect to see?
According to Ethnologue, there are 60,000 Spanish speakers in Israel, and (as of 1985) 100,000 Ladino speakers. (Note that these two sets are not necessarily distinct.)
Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian.
How about illegal immigrants/guest workers?
Hmm. Probably Tagalog, Thai, Mandarin, Romanian and several African languages. Guest workers generally interact with Israelis in English.
No, they mostly use Altec Lansing and Harmon Kardon.