When languages collide: language and conflict in Palestine and Israel

Abstract

Introduction In chapter 4, we discussed what happens when two dialects collide under conditions of intra-national conflict. Jordan served as the socio-political sphere for this study. Issues of ethnic/national identity and nation-state building were invoked to explain dialect shift and dialect maintenance in male and female speech. The view was put forward that female code-switching to the Madani variety was motivated by considerations of social prestige in a rapidly urbanizing/modernizing society. Male code-switching to the Bedouin variety was attributed to nation-state building in Jordan. Both phenomena, however, were linked to the demographic and political impact of the Arab–Israeli conflict on the history of Jordan. More specifically, the onset and accelerated development of male code-switching were ascribed to the clashes between the Jordanian government and the Palestinian guerrilla movement between 1970 and 1971. Evidence from a number of sociolinguistic studies on the language situation in Jordan was interpreted in terms of speech-accommodation theory and linked to Bourdieu's concept of the linguistic market to provide support for the above conclusions. In addition, considerations of differential power allocation in society were utilized to explain the direction of the dialect shift in male speech. This chapter will continue the discussion of language and socio-political conflict by considering the language situation in Israel/Palestine. Nothing has affected the course of political events in the Middle East more than the Arab–Israeli conflict.

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