Early Phonological Traditions in a Contemporary Hebrew Sociolect

Abstract

The article traces the place of, and changing attitudes in the research toward, the Mizrahi sociolect of Modern Hebrew in Israel. Initially defined by Haim Blanc in the 1950s as paralleling Askhenazoid Hebrew, Blanc’s sociolinguistic definition did not evoke scholarly interest. Many scholars noted the widespread adoption of the Ashkenazoid variety and even predicted the disappearance of the Mizrahi sociolect. A shift came in the twenty-first century. A comprehensive field study by the author showed the continued, widespread existence and distribution of the Mizrahi sociolect and its impact in many linguistic spheres. This article focuses on chosen phonological issues from Mizrahi Hebrew: the realization of pharyngeals, and of ṣere, and the preservation of precise, early Hebrew forms: šeʿur and the vowel in the second radical of III-y verbs, such as x̠iketi.