The Mizrahi Sociolect in Israel: Origins and Development

This article examines the Hebrew of a bilingual female speaker, a native of Morocco, who recounts a folktale in Hebrew on the theme “charity rescues from death”. Analyzed here are features from her native Judeo-Arabic, both overt and covert, that appear in the text. Clearly discernible influences of Judeo-Arabic on her Hebrew are found in the spheres of lexicon and semantics, syntax, and phonology. Seen as the first stage in the development of a distinct Israeli Hebrew sociolect, these features have parallels in the speech of native Israelis, the second-, third-, and fourth-generations of the immigration to Israel from Morocco who reside mainly in the Israeli periphery, and mark their spoken Hebrew as a separate Israeli Hebrew sociolect.