Historical overview and outcome of three Portuguese patterns in Judeo-Spanish: Quer(em)-se + PART. in active constructions, the wh-operator o que, and the inflected infinitive

Cultural and communal boundaries of the Sephardic communities emerged via hybridization and from the assimilation of elements of diverse cultural origin, in which the formation of Judeo-Spanish played a key role in the imaginative processes of developing Sephardic identity, and its preservation as the "language-of-power" within the communities gave meaning to their further existence. This chapter deals with language contact with Portuguese, variation and change in Judeo-Spanish. The intensity of this contact varied according to place and time, and the high degree of overlap in linguistic structure, which allowed significant interlingual conflation, will become obvious through the three patterns I shall address below.