Languages of Israel

Catalog description

Is Israel a multilingual or a monolingual country? This is a question with which many educators, linguists, politicians and laypeople have been struggling. In this course we will explore several issues of language use and practice in Israel, language ideology and language policy. We will start by learning the orthographies (spelling systems) of Hebrew and Arabic and practice them through the methodology of Linguistic Landscape. We will tour Tel Aviv-Jaffa and other places and study public signs and their use in Hebrew and Arabic as well as in other languages. We will look at signs, advertisements, instructions, buildings, streets, billboards, etc. This exercise will teach us much about the public space, who controls it and what cultural and political messages it sends us. We will then study parts of the basic lexicon of Hebrew and Arabic and also review their grammatical structure as well as their historical background—all of this in the larger context of the Semitic language family. Furthermore, in this course we will review the language policies of Israel. Language policies refer to decisions regarding language use in education and in society in general. Some language policies are explicit, others are not; some are top down, others are bottom-up; yet, policies are always derivatives of the groups that make up political entities (e.g., majority elites, minorities, immigrants, indigenous) interacting with a variety of political, ideological, social and economic factors. We will pay a special attention to the mechanisms used to determine language policies on the ground. We will also investigate language use in Israel; the practice and ideology behind the use of Hebrew as well as of the participating language Arabic (standard and colloquial varieties); the use of English, everybody’s second language in Israel; the use of recent immigration languages, Russian and…