Rhythm Is a Marker of Ethnicity in Modern Hebrew: Evidence from a Perception Study and Actors’ Ethnicized Portrayals

In Modern Hebrew, only three segmental markers are typically acknowledged as ethnically conditioned, and usage of these markers has significantly decreased in second and third generation speakers. Yet the sociolinguistic situation of diverging language backgrounds of first generation speakers, compounded with ethnic segregation in housing and the workforce, seems like a fertile ground for social identification from speech. We report two studies on prosodic variation in Modern Hebrew: a perception study and a “matched-pairs” corpus study. The results of the first illustrate that even in the absence of the known segmental markers, ethnicity perception of young native speakers may still diverge between two major ethnic identities, Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) and Ashkenazi (European). The main acoustic correlate was rhythm, measured as the proportional duration of vowels in the utterance. In the second study, actors’ speech rhythm was found to be modulated by their portrayed ethnic identity in the same direction, suggesting that this variable is socially salient—and for some speakers, controllable—enough to be involved in style shifting. This study joins a growing body of work illustrating that relatively mild rhythmic variation can contribute to social identification, and in the current case, also for ethnicity portrayal.