Arabic in an Ethnic Jewish State

This book is the text of the author's doctoral dissertation which she submitted to the Free University of Berlin in 2003. It consists of eight chapters and a conclusion organised over two parts. Part 1 provides a historical background to the status of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel in relation to Zionist ideology, the 'revitalisation' of Hebrew in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine and Israel's education and language policies in so far as these effect the position of Arabic in Israel. Part 2 deals with the linguistic consequences of these policies by considering three sites of language contact between Hebrew and Arabic: the lexical diffusion of Hebrew lexical items in Arabic, lexical borrowing from Hebrew into Arabic and the maintenance of Arabic as the language of intra-community communication and national identity marking for the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.