Inside the language planner's head: Tactical responses to a mass immigration

Abstract

To add a sudden 10% to its population in the form of 0.5 million Soviet migrants, professionalised and wedded to Russian culture, would test any monolingual society. Faced with this, Israel's traditional Hebrew‐enforcement policy in the Ingathering of the Diaspora is apparently in retreat. Israel is now officially committing large resources to fostering an immigrant language as a channel of information, education and culture. This study documents and evaluates this policy shift, with particular reference to the procedures and rationales of decision makers themselves. In 1993–94 I conducted interviews across central and local government and quasi‐official agencies. Instead of a centralised language policy, I found a multiplicity of individual Russian‐language initiatives and creative budgeting within ministries and agencies, made possible by the privatisation of absorption and policy fragmentation. These measures were widely portrayed as an emergency tactic for coping with the scale and alien nature of the influx, while maintaining traditional strategies of hebraisation. Vote‐catching and budget‐boosting have also played a part, helped by the low level of administrative and public opposition (reflecting the general decline in Hebraic nation‐building ideology). This is evidence of a powerful faith in the instrumental motive for acquiring a host language, however low the immigrants’ integrative motive may be. However, a positive promotion of Russian culture in some quarters points to changes of a strategic kind.

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