Sephardic Songs are sung in Ladino, the ancestral
Spanish of the Sephardic Jews of Spain(Sephard is
Hebrew for Spain). It is, to put it succinctly, 15th century Spanish, the kind of language used by Cervantes.

After the expulsion from Spain in 1442 by the Inquisition, the Sephardic Jews in their diaspora acquired many words from Greek, Turkish, etc. Ladino song always had a generous amount of Hebrew words mixed in with the Spanish. These songs have a haunting orientalism that is quite bewitching, with modal and meliismatic turns that strike us as echos from the East.