Regional and ethnic identity in Hebrew linguistic variation: A sociophonetic study of southern and central Israel

The study of sociolinguistic variation in Modern Hebrew is, in many respects, a nascent field. As relatively few studies have quantitatively investigated the speech of communities of speakers in Israel, much is still unknown about how Hebrew varies among speakers in different regions and of different social backgrounds. To address this research gap, the proposed project will conduct a large-scale sociolinguistic variation study in the city of Beer-Sheva. The analysis will focus on variation in the phonetic and phonological features of Hebrew, particularly with regard to the social factors of region and ethnicity.

Previous work on language and ethnicity in Hebrew has highlighted the salient distinction between Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi Jews. Most of this research has explored certain features stereotyped as “Mizrahi”, particularly the pharyngeal segments and the alveolar rhotic. More recent theorizations of language and ethnicity, however, emphasize the importance of examining the intersection of ethnicity and other aspects of identity, such as regional origin, and querying how ethnic identity and language use are co-constructed. The present study seeks to engage with questions of language and ethnicity in Israel on this basis, moving beyond a binary view and investigating how ethnic identity is constructed by members of specific regional communities in Israel. Furthermore, the study will explore phonetic distinctions in linguistic phenomena that are not socially stereotyped and have hitherto received little attention from researchers (e.g. sub-phonemic variation in the vowel system).

Unlike ethnicity, geographical variation in Hebrew has been largely overlooked in previous work, under the assumption that no regional dialects exist. This study proposes that while there is no salient notion of “dialect” among Israelis, there is nevertheless subtle meaningful regional variation worthy of exploration. To this end, the study will contrast the speech of individuals from Beer-Sheva with an existing corpus of Tel Aviv speakers, examining how phonological variables and fine-grained phonetic distinctions are linked with various social identities, including ethnicity, in the two communities.

This project will serve to enrich our understanding of the scope of variation in Modern Hebrew by contributing much-needed data regarding the language use of individuals from an understudied community, with consideration given to a more extensive set of linguistic features than has been previously examined, as well as by investigating the connections between language and a range of intersecting social identities. Beyond its implications for work in Modern Hebrew, this research also holds broader significance for sociolinguistic theory more generally. Given that our current understanding of sociolinguistic variation is largely based upon studies of English and other European languages, exploration of Modern Hebrew in Israel, which offers a different social dynamic and set of linguistic phenomena, will lead to valuable insights.