Palestinian dialects and identities shifting across physical and virtual borders

Funding source: British Academy, Grant number: pf160009.The 1948 war created a new situation in Palestine. Palestinians became dispersed across political borders that had not existed before, and these borders continued to change in different ways into the 21st century. In many respects, these political borders have had notable linguistic effects, introducing bilingualism and multilingualism for some Palestinians but not all, and subsequently affecting varieties of Palestinian Arabic in terms of their lexica, their grammars, and their speakers' sense of identity and belonging. Newcomers to Palestine, particularly Jewish immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries, were also compelled to adapt their linguistic practices to the new reality into which they implanted themselves. Finally, traditional dialectological boundaries, delineating Palestinian dialects according to regional and local linguistic features, have been affected by population shifts, redrawing of political borders and the catastrophic consequences of the wars the region has endured. This paper attempts to tackle the complex web of borders and boundaries that have shaped much of the sociolinguistics of Palestinians throughout most of the 20th century and into the first two decades of the 21st century.Peer reviewe

\u3cem\u3eIn Jerusalem\u3c/em\u3e by Mahmoud Darwish

Translated from the Arabic by Uri Horesh

Current research on linguistic variation in the Arabic-speaking world

Given its abundance of dialects, varieties, styles and registers, Arabic lends itself easily to the study of language variation and change. It is spoken by some 300 million people in an area spanning roughly from northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf. Traditional Arabic dialectology has dealt predominantly with geographical variation. However, in recent years, more nuanced studies of inter- and intra-speaker variation have seen the light of day. In some respects, Arabic sociolinguistics is still lagging behind the field compared to variationist studies in English and other Western languages. On the other hand, the insight presented in studies of Arabic can and should be considered in the course of shaping a crosslinguistic sociolinguistic theory. Variationist studies of Arabic speech communities began almost two decades after Labov’s pioneering studies of American English and have flourished following the turn of the twenty-first century. These studies have sparked debates between more quantitatively inclined sociolinguists and those who value qualitative analysis. In reality, virtually no sociolinguistic study of Arabic that includes statistical modeling is free of qualitative insights. They are also not flawless and not always cutting-edge methodologically or theoretically. But the field in moving in a positive direction, which will likely lead to the recognition of its significance to sociolinguistics at-large

Sociolinguistics of Palestinian Arabic

Contribution to the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language & Linguistic

Variationist Dialectology: Chain Shifts and Mergers in Yiddish

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the use of dialectological methodology to explain language change and account for variation. The data for this study have been extracted from The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAT)

Contact-induced change in Jaffa Palestinian Arabic: The case of (ʕ)

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What Predicts Pharyngeal Realizations in Bilingual Palestinians\u27 Hebrew?

Palestinians in Israel are typically bilingual in Palestinian Arabic and Modern Hebrew. Two pharyngeal segments exist in both languages, exhibiting different variation patterns. Most Jewish speakers of Hebrew replace them with non-pharyngeals, whereas Palestinian speakers generally do produce pharyngeals in Arabic. We analyze the Hebrew component of an Arabic/Hebrew bilingual corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with Palestinian speakers from Jaffa, who produce some pharyngeals in their Hebrew. A multivariate analysis of the Hebrew data shows that higher rates of pharyngeal production in Arabic do not predict higher rates of pharyngeals in Hebrew, suggesting that the Hebrew patterns cannot be attributed solely to linguistic transfer. Taking into account social factors such as medium of education, we argue that the use of pharyngeals is not simply a carryover from Arabic, but rather a socially meaningful resource indexically linked to the speakers’ Arab identity

Preface

The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club, the graduate student organization of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pennsylvania. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from the NWAV conference and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium. This volume contains the proceedings of the 32nd NWAVE Conference, October 9 to 12, 2003, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The inaugural Charles Ferguson Prize for best student paper or poster was awarded to Christine Mallinson and Becky Childs’ “Communities of Practice in Sociolinguistic Description: African American Women’s Language in Appalachia.” Thanks to Aaron Dinkin, Aviad Eilam, Michael Friesner, Ron Kim, Maya Ravindranath, Gillian Sankoff, and Suzanne Evans Wagner for their help in editing this volume