The Politics of Arabic in Israel: A Sociolinguistic Analysis Hardcover - 2017

From the rear cover

'Goes beyond a detailed analysis of the language issues, and provides a sensitive portrayal of a significant region of the Middle East, making clear the difficult and dangerous struggle between Israelis and Palestinians that underlies the language developments.' Bernard Spolsky, Professor Emeritus, Bar-Ilan University, Israel 'Away from simplistic binaries and shallow dichotomies, this book provides an authentic view on a forgotten group, the Palestinians in Israel, that cannot be found elsewhere. Analysing the Arabic spoken by the Palestinians in Israel, the author provides us with a rare glimpse into the existential world of a community that navigates between Israeli settler colonialism, Palestinian nationalism and the human desire for normality and life. A must read for anyone interested in the question of Israel/Palestine as well language and identity.' Ilan Pappé, Professor of History, University of Exeter Explores the contradictory position of Arabic being both the official language and marginalised in Israel Arabic became a minority language overnight in Israel in 1948, as a result of the Palestinian exodus from their land that year. Although it remains an official language, along with Hebrew, Israel has made continued attempts to marginalise Arabic on the one hand and securitise it on the other. Camelia Suleiman delves into these tensions and contradictions, exploring how language policy and language choice both reflect and challenge political identities of Arabs and Israelis. She explores the historic context of Arabic in Israel, the attempts at minoritising, Orientalising and securitising the language, the Linguistic Landscape (LL) of Arabic in Israel, the effect of globalisation, modernisation and citizenship status on the status of Arabic, Hebrew as a language choice of (semi) autobiographic production of three Israeli authors who are native speakers of Arabic, and lastly, a comparison with the status of Arabic in both Jordan and Palestine (West Bank and Gaza Strip) where Arabic is the official language. Key Features - Combines a variety of qualitative methods not commonly used together into the study of Arabic in Israel including ethnography, interviews with journalists and students, media discussion of the language situation of Israel, and analysis of the production of knowledge on Arabic in Israeli academia - Provides a comparative analysis of the language situation in Israel with that in Jordan and Palestine - Employs studies in post-colonial theory, theory of linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistic concepts of 'indexicality' and 'linguistic landscape' Camelia Suleiman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at Michigan State University. She is author of Language and Identity in the Israel-Palestine Conflict: The Politics of Self-Perception in the Middle East (2011). Cover image: translates as 'Language is inherited, like land'. Photograph taken in the Mahmoud Darwish's Museum in Ramallah Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-2086-0 Barcode