The pharyngeal segments in Hebrew, [ʕ] and [ħ], are historically conservative and considered prescriptively correct, but are also socially stigmatized as a feature associated with Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) descent. I present data from sociolinguistic interviews in two Israel field sites and demonstrate a robust pattern in both communities: speakers who produce pharyngeals in the interview use more [ʕ] in reading a word list than in free‐form conversation, but show no such effect for [ħ]. The results are difficult to reconcile with a single axis of standardness or formality and highlight the need for a more multidimensional approach to interpreting reading styles. Taking into account both the community's language ideologies that link reading styles to their ethnic identity and the fact that [ʕ] has been shown to be more useful as a stylistic resource for performing Mizrahi personae, I argue for an interpretation that considers word list reading as a site for performing a Mizrahi ethnic identity.
In this article we investigate the spatial politics of sexuality in Israel by focusing on two different but related data sets: (1) the official video for Tel Aviv Pride 2013 produced by the Mizrahi Jewish music group Arisa; and (2) a protest against the Occupation of Palestine performed at Tel Aviv Pride in 2017. We analyze these examples with the help of a theoretical framework that offers a dynamic conceptualization of citizenship and its semiotic manifestations, drawing on Fraser’s (1995) distinction between affirmative and transformative strategies of social justice. In line with the remit of this special issue, we highlight the importance of taking sexuality as an entry point for Linguistic Landscape analysis. More specifically, we argue that a focus on sexuality in space opens up a window into the affective, intimate and embodied dimensions of politics.
The aim of this article is to analyze the reactions of some mainstream Israeli politicians to a celebrity marriage between Tzahi Halevi, a Jewish Israeli actor, and Lucy Aharish, a Palestinian Israeli TV personality. Drawing upon the notion of stance, we unveil the affective trouble generated by this heterosexual union vis-à-vis the Israeli national project. More specifically, we tease out the kaleidoscopic collage of politicians' affective (dis)attachments in relation to Halevi, Aharish and a variety of socioculturally relevant categories such as the Israeli nation. This affective patchwork, we argue, is itself the product of a tension that is at the very heart of the Israeli nation-state, that between the policing of Jewishness as the defining principle of the Israeli national imagined community, on the one hand, and the upholding of the democratic imperative to equal treatment and recognition, on the other.
This article challenges the empirical generalization that the possessed element in the Hebrew possessive dative ( PD) construction cannot be an external argument (Borer and Grodzinsky 1986), a generalization that has been leveraged in the use of the PD construction as an unaccusativity diagnostic. An acceptability judgment experiment shows that the PD construction is dispreferred when the possessor is less prominent than the possessee on the animacy or definiteness scale; however, it shows no effect of unaccusativity, raising serious doubts regarding the construction's validity as an unaccusativity diagnostic.
Linguistic features that index ethnic identities often originate in another language spoken by the same community, often involving the introduction of exogenous features absent from the mainstream variety. We examine the more unusual situation of Hebrew spoken by Arabic–Hebrew bilingual Palestinians, where the pharyngeal consonants, which occur in both Arabic and Hebrew monolingual varieties, serve as ethnically linked sociolinguistic variables. Drawing on sociolinguistic interviews with such bilinguals in Jaffa, we demonstrate that while Palestinians’ use of pharyngeals in Hebrew is commonly perceived as transfer from Arabic, their linguistic and social conditioning does not support a transfer account. Rather, for these speakers, pharyngeals are a socially meaningful resource simultaneously linked to Arab identity and to a rich indexical field in Hebrew. While the pharyngeals pattern linguistically as Hebrew features, our findings illustrate that, from a social meaning perspective, sociolinguistic features need not be unambiguously associated with a single language.
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