The Politics Of Palestinian Multilingualism

The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship provides an essential contribution to understanding the politics of Israel/Palestine through the prism of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Arabic-speakers who also know Hebrew resort to a range of communicative strategies for their political ideas to be heard: they either accommodate or resist the Israeli institutional suppression of Arabic. They also codeswitch and borrow from Hebrew as well as from Arabic registers and styles in order to mobilise discursive authority. On political and cultural stages, multilingual Palestinian politicians and artists challenge the existing political structures. In the late capitalist market, language skills are re-packaged as commodified resources. With new evidence from recent and historical discourse, this book is about how speakers of a marginalised, contained language engage with the political system in the idioms at their disposal. The Politics of Palestinian Multilingualism: Speaking for Citizenship is key reading for advanced students and scholars of multilingualism, language contact, ideology, and policy, within sociolinguistics, anthropology, politics, and Middle Eastern studies.

This booklet investigates the major changes in demography, politics and language in the town of Bethlehem. It starts by tracing the political and economic history of the town over the past two millennia, and then makes a detailed study of the current linguistic landscape. The study shows the effect of the Christian institutions in introducing Western education and languages, and of the pilgrim and tourist industries in maintaining a high value for multilingualism. The sociolinguistic investigation reveals major changes in the Arabic spoken in the town. Whereas most residents formerly used a variety of Arabic similar to that spoken in Palestinian villages, emerging social identity issues seem to have produced new distinctions. Younger women and some Christian men are tending to adopt an urban pronunciation like that of nearby Jerusalem, at the same time as the speech of younger educated Moslems is showing the growing influence of the standard variety of Arabic. By relating the use of linguistic variants to changes in identity, this study shows that Bethlehem is a town in transition, being transformed from its previous status as a mainly Christian Arab town into an important Palestinian and dominantly Muslim city. The study has produced information that will greatly assist the development of language and language education policies. It shows the need to find a way to maintain and strengthen Arabic, while encouraging the development of competence in English, Hebrew and other languages that are vital for economic development.

The book explores the change over time in language-society relations in a multilingual periphery of Egypt. It examines the role of language ideologies in the construction and negotiation of social identities in the processes of contact, maintenance and shift typical of multilingualism. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, it is the first of its kind to portray the inventory of linguistic and accompanying non-linguistic behaviors observed within and between different ethnolinguistic groups in the Siwa Oasis. It provides first-hand information about the linguistic habits of Siwan women, an aspect which is generally difficult to access in this gender-segregated community. The book sheds light on Berber-Arabic contact at the core of the Arab world and at a critical time when individual linguistic repertoires are expanding and Arabic is emerging as a powerful resource.

This sociolinguistic study describes and analyzes an Israeli Palestinian border village in the Little Triangle and another village artificially divided between Israel and the West Bank, tracing the political transformations that they have undergone, and the accompanying social and cultural changes. These political, social and cultural forces have resulted in distinctive sociolinguistic patterns. The primary explanation offered for the persisting linguistic frontier found in rural Palestinian communities is the continuing social, political, economic and cultural differences between Palestinian villages in Israel, and Palestinian villages in the West Bank. In the geopolitical and economic history of the villages, these distinctions have been maintained by the dissimilar treatment received by the two communities and their inhabitants under Israeli government policy. Exacerbated by the Palestinian Intifada, the relations of the Palestinian divided communities to each other and to the rest of the world have produced noticeable differences in economic, educational and cultural development. The sociolinguistic facts revealed in the language situation in the villages are study shown to be correlated with political and demographic differences.

The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Viewing twentieth-century history through the lens of language, author Liora Halperin questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism during the years following World War I, demonstrating how Jews in Palestine remained connected linguistically by both preference and necessity to a world outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as it promoted Hebrew and achieved that language's dominance. The story of language encounters in Jewish Palestine is a fascinating tale of shifting power relationships, both locally and globally. Halperin's absorbing study explores how a young national community was compelled to modify the dictates of Hebrew exclusivity as it negotiated its relationships with its Jewish population, Palestinian Arabs, the British, and others outside the margins of the national project and ultimately came to terms with the limitations of its hegemony in an interconnected world.

This book examines the rise of English in Rwanda, offering critical insights into the links between language, colonialism, and capitalism, with implications for our understanding of global English. Spowage takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on political theory, cultural-materialism, and critical sociolinguistics. She positions language policy as an instrument for social reproduction and exploitation, but also a site of struggle and contest. Unravelling the complex history of language politics and policy in Rwanda, Spowage elaborates a theory of language as statecraft. This approach draws attention to the endurance of a colonial capitalist link between language and social class, while illuminating the specific power of English in legitimising neoliberal political power and class hierarchies. On this basis, Spowage argues for a theoretical reimagining of the spread of English through the ‘global English nébuleuse’, a model which aims to capture the complex mechanisms that reinforce the dominance of English and to identify points where those mechanisms are fragile. This innovative volume will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, global Englishes, language and politics, and African studies.

In this timely and innovative book, Tamar Katriel takes a language and discourse-centred approach to the subject of peace activism in Israel-Palestine, one of the most significant political issues of our time, while also posing more general questions about the role played by language in activist movements – how activists themselves conceptualize their speech and its relationship to action. Viewing activism as a globalized cultural formation that gives shape and meaning to grassroots organizations' struggles for political change, this book explores the relations between the cultural categories of speech and action as constructed and evaluated in activist contexts. It focuses on the specific empirical field of defiant discourse associated with the soldierly role in Israeli culture, using it to offer an in-depth exploration of the cultural underpinnings of defiant speech. Katriel interrogates discourse-centered activism as part of social movements' action repertoires on the one hand, and of the local cultural construction of speech cultures on the other. This is critical reading for all students and scholars studying activism and social movements within linguistics, Middle Eastern studies, peace studies, and communication studies.