61 Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 7.1 (2011): 61-100 DOI: 10.2478/v10016-011-0004-7 Roni Henkin-Roitfarb  Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Be’er-Sheva HEBREW AND ARABIC IN ASYMMETRIC CONTACT IN ISRAEL Abstract Israeli Hebrew (IH) and Palestinian Arabic (PA) 1 have existed side by side for well over a century in extremely close contact, accompanied by social and ideological tension, often conflict, between two communities: PA speakers, who turned from a majority to a minority following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and IH speakers, the contemporary majority, representing the dominant culture. The Hebrew- speaking Jewish group is heterogeneous in terms of lands of origin and includes a large community of Judeo-Arabic speakers. In this paper I discuss the ‘when,’ ‘where,’ how,’ and especially ‘why’ of mutual borrowing 2 between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel since the 1880s. I stress that the contact is asymmetric. The majority of Hebrew speakers today do not speak Arabic. They do, however, have access to borrowed lexicon in the domain of slang and vernacular speech that both enriches these registers and provides the speakers with a feeling of being  Department of Hebrew Language Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev The Marcus Family Campus, Be’er-Sheva, Israel e-mail: henkin@bgu.ac.il 1 Israeli Hebrew (IH) is the modern Hebrew spoken in Israel, as described in section 1. Palestinian Arabic (PA), as part of the Syro-Lebanese-Palestinian dialect-group, is a dialectal-geographical term that I restrict in this article to the political boundaries of Israel. I avoid the more transparent term Israeli Arabic, as it is politically loaded, and I include Bedouin dialects, although these constitute a distinct dialect-type generally not classified under Palestinian Arabic. All these dialects, as Arabic dialects in general, interact with Standard Arabic in a diglossic situation, better described as a register scale with linguistically distinct poles. 2 I use the term ‘borrowing’ in a wide sense to include all sorts of adoption, including codeswitching. Unauthenticated | 79.176.9.143 Download Date | 5/4/13 2:52 PM