The Languages of Israel: Policy, Ideology and Practice

This book is an original and comprehensive treatment of the languages of Israel - of the practice and of the ideology. Against the background of an original theory of language policy set out in the opening, it asks about the extent to which the present linguistic pattern may be attributed to explicit language planning activities. The chapters give balanced analyses of the history and current status of the revitalized national language Hebrew, of the second official language Arabic, of the all-pervasive international language English, of the large number of immigrant languages brought to Israel, and in particular of the fate of the many Jewish languages. This is all tied together with a reasoned account of the new language education policy, and a consideration of the likelihood that the long hegemony of Hebrew is giving way to an evolving acceptance of linguistic diversity.

Bernard Spolsky is professor of English at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and director of its Language Policy Research Center. His most recent book is Sociolinguistics (Oxford), and he is currently editing the Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics (Elsevier). Elana Shohamy is professor of Education at Tel Aviv University and has been director of research at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington. Her book Second Language Research Methods (Oxford) is a classic, and she is just finishing The Power of Tests: A Critical Perspective (Longmans).