Judeo-Spanish (also Judaeo-Spanish and Judæo-Spanish: , Hebrew script: , Cyrillic: ), commonly referred to as Ladino, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. During the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries Judeo-Spanish blossomed into a language of journalism and popular literature, resulting in a bibliography of almost four hundred periodical titles and a corpus of novels, theatrical plays, poems, and other minor genres. Originally spoken in the former territories of the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa) as well as in France, Italy, Netherlands, Morocco, and the UK, today it is spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, most of the speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, Spain, Turkey and France.