Publications

Publication details [#63494]

Abu Elhija, Duaa. 2017. Hebrew Loanwords in the Palestinian Israeli Variety of Arabic (Facebook Data). Journal of language contact 10 (3).
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Brill

Annotation

This study explores borrowings from Hebrew into Arabic as employed by Nazarene and Iksali1 Palestinian Israelis in the context of Arabic computer-mediated communication (cmc), particularly the written colloquial Palestinian Israeli dialect of Arabic in Facebook. The study centers on the frequency of the borrowed items, phonological adjustment, and the reasons for borrowing from Hebrew. Three suppositions are explored: First, the most frequent borrowed items are nouns. Second, borrowed items are adjusted to the Arabic phonological system. Finally, the major reasons for borrowing are to propose culturally or technologically novel notions, as well as novel ways to address preexisting concepts. Most of these suppositions are displayed to be correct. However, the frequency of borrowing in the corpus does not reflect the language contact intensity between Hebrew and the Palestinian Israeli dialect. This study describes the language contact situation between Hebrew and Arabic and shows how intense it is, classifying it as falling between the third and fourth level of intensity according to Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) borrowing scale. However, borrowing is limited to lexical borrowing, especially of nouns. The study supplies explanations that refer to the political and cultural situation (covering identity issues) of Palestinian Israelis.