Israeli Hebrew in the Mouths of Native Negev Arabic Speakers: Some Characteristic Interference Features in Phonology, Syntax and Morphology (original) (raw)

The Negev Bedouins in Israel, though native speakers of Negev Arabic, use Modern Israeli Hebrew out of educational, professional and social necessity - often on a daily basis. This paper is based on a spoken-data corpus from seven female Bedouins and identifies the salient interference features of native Arabic attested in the speakers' Hebrew speech. Going beyond previous studies of Arabic-Hebrew contact which focused on overt lexical borrowings, this investigation shows the creative nature of phonological and syntactic interference: often, a transfer involves a re-combination of formal and functional elements. In syntax, for instance, I show that a formal syntactic pattern (asyndetic relative clauses) is transferred beyond its 'original' function in the Source Language - to clauses with definite nouns. This challenges the notion that contact-induced features are structures or lexical material which were simply transferred from one language to the other.