But in the past three decades, the urgency of these losses has blossomed into a global language revitalization movement with a wide range of strategies and a robust toolkit of methods. I am lucky to be working on my doctorate in one of the hubs of this movement: the UC Berkeley linguistics department, which hosts one of the largest archives<\/a> of indigenous and endangered language materials in the world and the Breath of Life Institute<\/a>, a biannual workshop which pairs linguists with leaders from California indigenous tribes to dive into the archives together and work on projects to revitalize their languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was here at Berkeley, in a lecture for the graduate-level Indigenous Language Revitalization course, that I learned about a method I had never heard of: at-home language nesting. Joining us in class that day was Dr. Zalmai \u201cZeke\u201d Zahir, a linguist and teacher of the indigenous Lushootseed language spoken in present-day Seattle, who honed in on the issue of the loss of spaces where endangered language could be spoken. After twenty years of teaching traditional-style Lushootseed classes, he lamented that he still saw his students forgetting what they had learned as soon as the class was over. Outside of the classroom, in a community with few or no living fluent speakers, where could learners go to speak?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Zahir\u2019s solution was to draw on the idea of a \u201clanguage nest\u201d \u2014 a designated place to speak the target language, used successfully in Hawai\u2019i (see Wilson and Kaman\u0101 2001) and Aotearoa\/New Zealand (see King 2001) to create immersion schools for children \u2014 and to show that language nests can be built in our very homes. Indeed, establishing immersion schools is not feasible in every community, but nearly everyone has control over their language use at home. An at-home language nest, therefore, is a room in the home where a learner strives to use the target language as much as possible, carving out a safe space (indeed, a nest!) for the language to live and grow (Zahir 2018). One solution is the Internet, whose power Ladino language advocates have expertly wielded, especially in the wake of the 2020 pandemic and the boom of interest in Ladino classes on Zoom (see Brink-Danan 2010, Cruz \u00c7illi 2021, Held 2010, Yebra L\u00f3pez 2021 and 2025). But I immediately saw the beauty and strategy in carving out new spaces for Ladino in our homes: homes, after all, are where we conduct our daily lives, build habits, engage in many cultural and religious practices, feel belonging, and, for some, raise families and transmit language to them. Designating a single room as a language nest also seemed to be a brilliant way to make learning manageable for learners, who oftentimes experience overwhelm \u2014 especially when language acquisition is infused with the emotional intensity of reclaiming an endangered or ancestral language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After putting feelers out among a few Ladino language activists and hearing their enthusiasm about the method, I got to work on an at-home language nesting kit for Ladino. I decided to start in the kitchen \u2014 so often, especially in Sephardic households, the heart of the home. I established a partnership with Nesi Altaras, a heritage Ladino speaker from Istanbul and a PhD student in History at Stanford University, and together we traveled to Istanbul, his hometown, and a hub of Ladino-speaking community and language activism. Beginning at the home of Nesi\u2019s grandparents, we visited mother-tongue Ladino speakers across the city in their kitchens, recording them as they talked through their daily activities. One speaker made cheese sandwiches for her grandchildren as our recorders rolled, another brewed us coffee and put together his daily breakfast of bread, cheese, olives, and watermelon. How, we asked, do you say \u201ccutting board\u201d in Ladino? What about \u201cpeeler\u201d? What does it sound like to have a conversation about deciding what to cook for dinner?<\/p>\n\n\n\n From these recordings, I developed materials for eighteen daily activities \u2014 called \u201cdomains\u201d \u2014 that learners can use to build a language nest in their own kitchens. Many of these are self-narration tasks, where learners talk themselves through an activity in the first person, but others are dialogues and still others are \u201cframes,\u201d where learners are provided with the skeleton of a sentence and word banks to fill it in with. Once the text was edited by a team of speakers of various Ladino dialects, I created a 5×7 card (inches, 13x18cm) for each domain (Figures 1-4) intended to be posted visibly in a learner\u2019s kitchen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The cards cover a domain in 8-10 sentences, color-coded to match Ladino words with their English equivalents. They also include a QR code that links a user to our website, ladinoenkaza.com<\/a>, which contains supplemental content like audio recordings and metalinguistic commentary for each domain. A learner wondering, for example, whether to say \u201cpuntos\u201d or \u201cminutos\u201d (\u2018minutes\u2019) as they make their tea will find on the website that \u201cpuntos\u201d is used by most speakers in Istanbul while \u201cminutos\u201d is preferred by most speakers in Izmir, as well as a recording of Rachel Bortnick, a prolific Ladino language advocate, modeling the pronunciation for both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Spring 2024, we secured the kit\u2019s first testers: the students of the first-ever Ladino class in the history of UC Berkeley. Each week for ten weeks, the students received a new domain for their kitchens \u2014 washing dishes, making pasta, making breakfast, and more \u2014 and they culminated the semester by writing a domain of their own. In their feedback surveys, multiple students wrote about the way that their burgeoning language nest made Ladino feel “alive” and \u201cpresent” to them. At the same time, I was building a language nest in my own kitchen and shared their astonishment. After two months, as I told friends, I felt a wonderful and unmistakable presence in my kitchen, like Ladino lived<\/em> there. I also noticed my proficiency skyrocketing as I now spoke the language every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This past semester, I expanded the language nesting kit to the bathroom, thinking especially of people with young children. For them, Rachel Bortnick and I co-wrote special domains that parents or guardians can use for helping with bath time, brushing teeth, and more (Figure 5).<\/ins><\/p>\n\n\n\n As we make the final touches on the Ladino language nesting resources, my team and I are looking forward to outreach. I would like to get the kit \u2014 which will come boxed, like a small board game \u2014 into the hands of as many Ladino learners as possible. To do that, we\u2019ll be partnering with the American Ladino League and sending copies to Sephardic hubs like Seattle and Istanbul to begin with. Future iterations, ideally, will include translations of the English in the kit into Turkish and other contact languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But there\u2019s another type of outreach I\u2019ll be doing: sharing templates for language nesting with other communities and language instructors (which can currently be found on the homepage of ladinoenkaza.com). This project came to me, after all, from Dr. Zahir\u2019s work on Lushootseed and the deep collaboration between us that followed. As we do the urgent and vital work of language revitalization, no one needs to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we need to nurture each other \u2014 just like we do in a language nest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n References <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Brink-Danan, M. (2011). The Meaning of Ladino: The Semiotics of an Online Speech Community<\/a>. Language & Communication<\/em>, 31<\/em>(2), 107\u2013118.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cruz \u00c7illi, K. (2021, January 9). \u2018Ladino\u2019s Renaissance\u2019: For This Dying Jewish Language, COVID Has Been an Unlikely Lifesaver.<\/a> Kenan Cruz \u00c7illi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fredholm, K. (2023). Challenges and Needs in Ladino Teaching Among Ten Language Revitalisation Activists<\/a>. Meldar: Revista Internacional de Estudios Sefard\u00edes, 4, 43\u201369.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Held, M. (2010). \u201cThe People Who Almost Forgot\u201d: Judeo-Spanish Web-Based Interactions as a Digital Home-Land.<\/a> El Prezente: Studies in Sephardic Culture, 4, <\/em>83\u2013102.<\/p>\n\n\n\n King, Jeanette.<\/strong> “Te K\u014dhanga Reo: M\u0101ori Language Revitalization.”<\/a> The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice<\/em>, edited by Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale, Academic Press, 2001, pp. 119\u2013128.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wilson, William, and Kauanoe Kaman\u0101.<\/strong> “Mai Loko Mai O Ka \u2018I\u2018Ini: Proceeding from a Dream. The \u2018Aha P\u016bnana Leo Connection in Hawaiian Language Revitalization.<\/a>” The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice<\/em>, edited by Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale, Academic Press, 2001, pp. 147\u2013176.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yebra L\u00f3pez, C. (2021). The Digital (De)territorialization of Ladino in the Twenty-First Century.<\/a> WORD, 67(1), 94\u2013116.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yebra L\u00f3pez, C. (2025). Ladino on the Internet: Sepharad 4<\/a><\/em>. Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was astounded by the simplicity and clarity of Dr. Zahir\u2019s idea. At the time, I was beginning my doctoral work on Ladino, the language of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who scattered across the Mediterranean, bringing their 15th century Ibero-Romance varieties with them and borrowing elements of Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Serbian\/Bosnian\/Croatian, and French over the subsequent five centuries. Now, the vibrant Ladino revitalization movement is grappling with the challenges presented by a widely dispersed diaspora, and asking the same questions Dr. Zahir was asking: where, and how, can speakers and learners come together to speak the language? In Fredholm\u2019s (2023) wonderful article surveying the observations and needs of Ladino teachers, one instructor voiced just this: \u201cMe parese ke para ke la lingua tenga un avenir, tenemos ke dar espasyos ande la lingua se pueda uzar.\u201d [I believe that for the language to have a future, we have to create spaces where the language can be used.] <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sola.kau.se\/cslblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/310\/2025\/05\/2-combo-2-1024x744.png\")
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