Hebrew Loanwords in Two Rural Dialects of Arabic in Israel

Abstract

This study examines loanwords from Hebrew into Arabic in the spoken language of people from Iksal village, in the lower Galilee and Um Al-Fahm city, in the Triangle region in Israel. The current study specifically examines borrowing in spoken language, with a comparison of the current findings with a previous research by Abu Elhija (2017), where the data was taken from online writings on Facebook. The research questions the frequency of loanword items from Hebrew into two rural dialects, the domains that appear with Hebrew loanwords, the phonological representations of the loanwords, and the reasons for these words to be borrowed. The main findings show that more loanwords were found in the spoken corpus than in the social media corpus in Abu Elhija (2017). There are more loanwords in synchronous communication compared to asynchronous. The findings also show that topics like education, employment, and technology had the most extensive loanwords. Moreover, in the case of loanwords used by Arabs in Israel, a word can be considered a loanword regardless of its phonology.