This paper presents a newly published edited book titled Multilingual Israel: Language Ideologies, Survival, Integration, and Hybridization (Multilingual Matters), examining dimensions of Israel's multilingualism. Taking Joshua Fishman's notions of language loyalty and shift as a starting point, the exploration of languages in Israel today shows that its language varieties have become more diverse and go beyond named languages and the hegemony of Hebrew.
A comparison will be made with Spolsky and Shohamy's previous exploration of the linguistic diversity of Israel in 1999. The comparison mainly shows, on the one hand, that numerous language communities, mainly used by Jewish speakers, have shrunk or nearly disappeared since 1999, because of the hegemony of Hebrew. On the other hand, many other language varieties that had not been previously used in Israel emerged, including languages as different as varieties of Chinese, Sudanese Arabic, Tigrinya, Yoruba, Tagalog, Igbo, Telugu, Bengali, Ukrainian, Zaghawa, Nepali, Portuguese, Fur, Kannada, Thai, Isan, and Nuer, showing diverse multilingual patterns..
The presentation will discuss three aspects of Israel's multilingualism: (1) The role of language ideologies, including Hebrew-only ideologies that led to the spread of Hebrew and the lowering of the status of Arabic from "official" to "a special language" in 2018; (2) The challenges of language loyalty, survival, and integration in a wide range of social settings, including African asylum seekers, Jewish immigrants, speakers of endangered Jewish languages, and sign language users from various communities; (3) Linguistic and cultural hybridization, mainly related to the Arabic speakers, exploring the concept of "Israeli Arabic" and looking into Hebrew-based and English-based hybrids, as well as examining Russian culture in Israel through the lens of folkloric tales that originated in Islamic culture, survived the Soviet revolution, and were imported by immigrants from the former Soviet Union into Israel.
