Tag #122999 - Interview #95883 (Gitli Alhalel)

At home we always spoke in Bulgarian and in Ladino. We spoke both languages at the same time very rarely (maybe when I was a child) - for example, my father or my mother would say something in Ladino, and I would answer in Bulgarian or vice versa. Of course, before I started school I spoke to my peers in Ladino, since we lived in the Jewish neighborhood, Kale. The truth is that the times were different then. I mean, there were not so many mixed marriages between Jews and Bulgarians. Nowadays, the first language children learn is the Bulgarian. At those times my parents and the parents of all children I knew were Sephardi. So, our mother tongue was Ladino. We spoke it at home and outside, we also used it in the Jewish school, because we were all Jewish children from Sephardi families and it was the language closest to us.