ENGLISH IN ISRAEL: SOCIOLINGUISTIC AND LINGUISTIC ASPECTS * Yael Reshef English in Israel takes part in a complex linguistic situation, charac- terized by a dominant monolingual ideology, accompanied by actual mul- tilinguism. The population is divided into a Jewish majority and a big Arab-speaking minority, amounting to circa 20% of the population. 1 The Jewish sector itself, while in principle Hebrew-speaking, is only partly composed of native speakers of the language. Reflecting the character of Israel as an immigrant society, it includes a large percentage of native speakers of a variety of other languages, whose share in the population periodically increases due to waves of mass immigration from various parts of the world. While a full integration into Israeli society requires the immigrants to acquire Hebrew, some immigrant groups show a ten- dency towards language maintenance, either in the domestic sphere alone or in wider communicative functions, creating pockets of other languages within the surrounding Hebrew-speaking environment. 2 In recent years * This article was originally written upon request from Prof. Maria Luisa Mayer Modena for a conference which took place at the University of Milan in October 2003. I thank her for the opportunity to study this topic, as well as the long-term guidance she gave me in the field of Judeo-Italian. 1 This article concentrates on the Hebrew-speaking Jewish population. For a dis- cussion and bibliographic references regarding English in the Arab sector see BERNARD SPOLSKY - ELANA SHOHAMY, The Languages of Israel: Policy, Ideology and Practice, Cleve- don, Multilingual Matters, 1999 [SPOLSKY - SHOHAMY], chapter 7 (especially pp. 160- 161, 183-184). 2 For data see SPOLSKY - SHOHAMY, pp. 3-4.