Multilingua 2021; 40(5): 647–673 Uri Horesh* Palestinian dialects and identities shifting across physical and virtual borders https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2020-0104 Abstract: The 1948 war created a new situation in Palestine. Palestinians became dispersed across political borders that had not existed before, and these borders continued to change in different ways into the 21st century. In many respects, these political borders have had notable linguistic effects, introducing bilingualism and multilingualism for some Palestinians but not all, and subsequently affecting varieties of Palestinian Arabic in terms of their lexica, their grammars, and their speakers’ sense of identity and belonging. Newcomers to Palestine, particularly Jewish immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries, were also compelled to adapt their linguistic practices to the new reality into which they implanted themselves. Finally, traditional dialectological boundaries, delineating Palestinian dialects according to regional and local linguistic features, have been affected by popu- lation shifts, redrawing of political borders and the catastrophic consequences of the wars the region has endured. This paper attempts to tackle the complex web of borders and boundaries that have shaped much of the sociolinguistics of Pales- tinians throughout most of the 20th century and into the first two decades of the 21st century. Keywords: Arabic, dialectology, Hebrew, language contact, language variation and change, sociolinguistics 1 Introduction On May 14, 1948, new political borders were drawn in Palestine. These borders were later redrawn following the June 1967 war, and again in 1982, when Israel returned occupied land to Egypt following the signing of a peace treaty be- tween the two countries based on the Camp David Accords (see, e.g., Anziska Achva Academic College is located amidst the ruins of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages of Tall al-Turmus and Qastina. *Corresponding author: Uri Horesh, Achva Academic College, Arugot, Israel, E-mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2020 Uri Horesh, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 648 U. Horesh 2018).1 Additional border shifts were made between Israel and Lebanon from 1982 to the early 2000s and between Israel and the newly formed Palestinian Authority in 1993 and arguably in 2006 when Israel unilaterally closed off the Gaza Strip. In addition to the borders having shifted – some critics of Israeli policy have named Israel a “state without borders” (see, e.g., Fincham 2014) – populations have shifted as well. Jewish immigrants have been settling in Palestine since the late nineteenth century; indigenous Palestinians have been forcefully exiled both internally and externally; citizens of Lebanon and Egypt have been forced to move due to Israeli military operations; and certain Syrian citizens – in the occupied Golan Heights – have suddenly become residents of Israel. Also, in what may seem to be a reverse phenomenon, many Palestinians have been prevented from mov- ing, particularly in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in refugee camps in Lebanon and (until recently) Syria. These border shifts and population movements have resulted in intricate changes in national, and subsequently, linguistic allegiances. Approximately 3 million Palestinians now call Jordan home and have contributed significantly to new dialect formation in the kingdom, particularly in the capital Amman (Al-Wer 2002, 2003, 2007). Nearly 2 million Palestinians have nominally become citizens of Israel, acquiring Hebrew as their second language.2 Due to this close contact with and newly acquired proficiency in Hebrew, the lexicon and structure of their native varieties of Arabic have begun showing contact-induced effects (Amara 2007; Geva-Gleinberger 2007; Henkin-Roitfarb 2011; Horesh 2015). In terms of the Pal- estinian population of the region, then, it may be said that we are witnessing a combination of political borders moving around as a result of historical events and speakers moving across virtual borders of linguistic, societal, national and ethnic orientation. Building on an evolving corpus of Palestinian Arabic, comprising sociolin- guistic interviews I conducted in various locales in Palestine, this paper examines grammatical as well as ideological variation among speakers of Palestinian Arabic. Have these border shifts and crossings caused some Palestinians to ‘become’ Jordanian and other to ‘become’ Israeli? How is this manifest in speakers’ overt and covert attitudes towards their identities, and what are some of the effects these political processes have had on language variation and change in the region? One 1 Ansizka’s introduction (2018: 1–16) provides a concise overview of the political events relevant to this study; the rest of the book discusses them in greater detail. 2 In some cases, certain Palestinians can actually be considered bilingual in Arabic and Hebrew, rather than L1 speakers of Arabic and L2 speakers of Hebrew. See Gafter and Horesh (2020a, 2020b). Palestinian dialects across borders 649 thing to bear in mind is that some of these effects, both in terms of ideology and in terms of their linguistic consequences, appear to be subconscious. The details of the degree of consciousness in this context call into question some of the gener- alizations made by Labov (1990, 1994) regarding “change from above” and “change from below,” an issue discussed later in this paper. 2 Palestine: The path to multilingualism 2.1 Overview Historic Palestine, the area currently comprising the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel, has in recent decades established itself as a multilingual region. The two prevailing spoken languages are Modern Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic, but for reasons explained below, the linguistic myriad is far more complex than that of a simply bilingual situation. While the existence of regional dialects of Modern Hebrew has not been formally documented (but see, e.g., Gafter 2016 for a recent discussion of ethnic varieties of the language), Palestinian Arabic, like other ‘national’ varieties of Arabic, is well known for having both regional sub-varieties and “ecolinguistic” (see Cadora 1992) ones, namely urban, rural and Bedouin, the latter referring to the dialects spoken by either current nomadic tribes or sedentary descendants thereof. A further complication is manifest in the ethnic composition of the Jewish population of historic Palestine, i.e., the Jewish citizens of current-day Israel. While Modern Hebrew is the prevailing language of everyday communication for thisgroup,itsstatusasanativelanguageisconfined predominantly to those Jewish Israelis born and educated in the country. The number of current Hebrew- speaking Israelis who are recent immigrants to the country can be estimated at roughly half of the entire population. These include both immigrants who have arrived in the last two decades, mostly from the former Soviet Union, whose native language is usually Russian or Ukrainian, and earlier immigrants who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century, whose native languages are numerous, and include various dialects of Arabic, e.g., Iraqi, Moroccan, Tunisian, Yemeni and Egyptian. Notably, there are virtually no immigrants who speak Palestinian Arabic as their native language, and only few who speak related Levantine dialects (viz., Lebanese and Syrian Arabic). 650 U. Horesh 2.2 Palestinians post-1948 The aforementioned border shifts have had quite noticeable linguistic ramifica- tions. A good portion of Palestine’s indigenous Arabic-speaking population have found themselves following the 1948 war, commonly referred to in Arabic as al- nakba ‘the catastrophe’ and in Hebrew as atsmaut͡ ‘independence,’ in one of the following new environments: 1. displaced into places other than their original communities within the 1948 borders, as Israeli citizens. This could have happened either because their original towns or villages were destroyed in the war or because, as in the case of larger towns that remained intact, they have been forced out of their existing communities into others that also remained intact. The linguistic consequence of this process of internal displacement has typically been the acquisition of Modern Hebrew as a second language, especially among the generations born into this new scenario and educated within the newly formed Israeli school system. In addition, many such Palestinians have assimilated into their new communities and adopted the local dialects thereof. Again, this is particularly true of the second generation onwards. 2. displaced within Palestine, but outside of the borders of the Israeli state. This category includes Palestinians who, following 1948, ended up in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. The former was under Jordanian rule until 1967 and the latter under Egyptian rule until that year. Linguistically, this particular type of displacement has resulted in the following: a. retention of monolingualism within this speech community, the exceptions being the acquisition of foreign languages (mostly English) as taught in schools and (usually limited) Hebrew for those members of this group who have worked, following the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, within Israel – or in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – mostly in manual labor such as agriculture and construction. b. contact with the local dialects typical of speakers’