Palestinian-Israeli Contact and Linguistic Practices

Offering insight into linguistic practices resulting from different kinds of Palestinian-Israeli contact, this book examines a specific conceptualisation of the link between the political and economic contexts and human practices, or between structure and agency, termed "articulation".

The contexts of the military occupation, a shared consumer market, controlled cheap labour migration, and the provision of social services, supply the setting for power relations between Israelis and Palestinians which give rise to a variety of linguistic practices. Among these practices is the borrowing of Hebrew words and phrases for use in Palestinians’ Arabic speech. Hebrew borrowings can demarcate in-groups, signal aspirations to a modern lifestyle, and give a political edge to humour. Nancy Hawker’s explanation for these practices moves away from the notions of conflict and national identity and gives prominence to Palestinian and Israeli ideologies that inform the conceptual experience of Palestinians.

Addressing an understudied linguistic situation, Palestinian-Israeli Contact and Linguistic Practices brings us documentation and analysis of recent casework, firmly anchored in empirical results from fieldwork in three refugee camps in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Combining sociolinguistics with politics, economics, sociology and philosophy this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Linguistics and Political Theory.

Nancy Hawker, MA (SOAS), DPhil (Oxon), has been travelling to the Middle East since 1998 and lived there for several years. Besides sociolinguistics, she has studied social and political theory, and Arab and Israeli histories and literatures. She knows Arabic, Czech, English, French and Hebrew.