Judeo-Kashani
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Welcome to the Judeo-Kashani (Kashi) Living Dictionary!

The ethnonym for both the Judeo-Kashani people and language is Kashi, and the endonym for the language is Jidi.

Geography and History

- Kashi is an Indo-European language in the Central Plateau branch of the Median branch of the Northwestern Iranian branch of Indo-Iranian. It is related to other Jewish languages in Iran (Esfahani, Hamedani, Yazdi, Kermani, etc.), but each Jewish dialect was isolated enough to remain distinct from each other, from the local Persian dialect, and from the Semitic language of Judeo-Persian. Although Kashi was originally spoken only by the Jewish population in the Jewish areas of Kashan, Iran, after their expulsion in the mid 20th century, it only exists as a moribund dialect spoken by elder emigrants in Israel and the United States where English, Hebrew, or Standard Persian dominate. 

Language documentation this living dictionary

- The cultural knowledge about Judeo-Kashani can be found in the works of Dr. Habib Borjian, a scholar of Iranian culture and languages. 

- The lexical information in this dictionary comes from a handwritten dictionary by American immigrants from Kashan who put together over 700 entries. Each entry has been digitized, cleaned, and checked for clarity. The original—by Norman "Nourollah" Gabay, Nourollah Kharrazi, and Haroon Soroudi—can be found here.

- This iteration of the Judeo-Kashani living dictionary was produced in 2023-2024 by Charlie Perlstein, Haideh Herbert, Alan Niku, Eden Moyal, and gracious help from Dr. Ourshalimi, alongside Anna Luisa Daigneault from the Living Dictionaries platform.