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Part of
Arabic in Contact
Edited by Stefano Manfredi and Mauro Tosco
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 6] 2018
► pp. 331–347

Arabic borrowing of the Hebrew word menahēl ‘manager’

Articulations and ideologies

| University of Oxford

Ideologies, or ways of understanding one’s relation to the world, impede or encourage, and affect the form of, language contact practices such as borrowing and codeswitching. This is illustrated by the pragmatic functions – informative or humorous – of the Israeli Hebrew word menahēl ‘boss’ in Palestinian Arabic. By using ‘boss’ in an ironic sense, to refer to a self-important ‘big-head’, Palestinians are expressing their stance by means of a Hebrew loanword, to take a dig at the powers that be. The article provides examples of real usage and grounds the explanation for the different meanings in pragmatics, cultural theory, and Althusser’s conception of ideologies in ways that are useful to linguistic ethnography.

Keywords: Palestine, Israel, migrant workers, borrowing, codeswitching, humour, ideology, political economy, pragmatics, Arabic, Hebrew, linguistic ethnography
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Who’s the ‘boss’? Maʽallim (Arabic) and menahēl (Hebrew loanword), and the speech of Palestinian day-migrant workers
  • 3. No kudos for the ‘big boss’: Menahēl in ironic power humour
  • 4.An explanatory model for the uses of menahēl: articulations and ideologies
  • 5.Conclusion: Articulations and ideologies: definitions and links to broader questions
  • Acknowledgment
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 10 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.6.17haw
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