Judeo-Tat
Persian-derived Jewish language of the eastern Caucasus
Judeo-Tat or Juhuri (Cuhuri, Жугьури, ז׳אוּהאוּראִ) is a Judeo-Persian dialect and the traditional language spoken by the Mountain Jews in the eastern Caucasus Mountains, especially Azerbaijan, parts of Russia and today in Israel. It belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian division of the Indo-European languages, albeit with heavy influence from Hebrew. The words Juhuri and Juhuro translate as "Jewish" and "Jews".
The Iranic Tat language is spoken by the Muslim Tats of Azerbaijan, a group to which the Mountain Jews were mistakenly considered to belong during the era of Soviet historiography though the languages probably originated in the same region of the Persian Empire.
Judeo-Tat features Semitic elements in all linguistic levels of the language. Uniquely, Judeo-Tat retains the voiced pharyngeal approximant, also known as ayin (ع/ע), a phoneme whose presence is considered to be a hallmark of Semitic languages such as Arabic and no longer found in Modern Hebrew; no neighbouring languages feature it.
Judeo-Tat is an endangered language classified as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.
Distribution
The language is spoken by an estimated 101,000 people:
Israel: 70,000 in 1998
Azerbaijan: 24,000 in 1989
Russia: 2,000 in 2010
United States: 5,000
Canada 2,500
Dialects
Being a variety of the Tat language, Judeo-Tat itself can be divided into several dialects:
Quba dialect (traditionally spoken in Quba and Qırmızı Qəsəbə as well as other towns and villages in the region.).
Derbent dialect (traditionally spoken in the town of Derbent and the surrounding villages).
Kaitag dialect (spoken in the North Caucasus).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Judeo-Tat” as persian-derived Jewish language of the eastern Caucasus. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56495. The Library of Congress control number is sh97007140. Authority coordinates are 42.072, 48.261. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998, 1989 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Judeo-Tat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.