Speaking Arabic, Writing Hebrew. Linguistic Transitions in Christian Arab Communities in Israel

This article portrays some aspects of the unique circumstances of Christian Arabs in current day Israel. More specifically, we focus on linguistic transitions observed in the mixed Jewish-Arab cities of Jaffa, Lydda and Ramle. While Arabic remains the language of everyday speech in these Christian Arab communities, Hebrew gradually serves more and more for writing. This may be either by using the Hebrew alphabet for transliterating Arabic, or by simply writing in Hebrew. In what follows we analyze samples of Arabic texts written in Hebrew characters. Section 2 exhibits Arabic confessional texts written in Hebrew letters by the priest of a small church in Jaffa. These samples illustrate how the religious realm, which is more conservative by nature, is being affected by the current linguistic transitions. In section 4 we discuss comparable cases illustrating the emergence of such hybrid texts in other Christian social frames. The orthography of all texts examined exhibits much incoherence and frequent transitions between the conservative spelling of standard Arabic, features of colloquial Arabic and traces of Modern Hebrew. This "Non-methodical" orthography is characteristic of a transitional stage, in which there is no stability of usage, and in which processes of regularization have not yet evolved. Our findings may be taken to indicate the emergence of a new diglossic reality, in which individuals or whole communities speak Arabic but write Hebrew, with a transitional stage reflected by writing Arabic in Hebrew letters. By investigating these linguistic transitions we hope to give insight into the ties linking language to communal identity.