In this book, Eve Afifa Kheir delves into the relationship between sociopolitical identity and codeswitching. Kheir examines the complex language situation in Israel and focuses on the phenomenon of codeswitching among the Israel Arab and Druze communities. The complex language situation partly arises out of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the dominance of Israeli-Hebrew and the increasingly peripheral position of Arabic.
The book is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is an introductory part that walks readers through the detailed background information concerning different definitions, theories, and models of codeswitching. Kheir also gives a brief introduction to the distribution of Arabic speaking populations and whether the Arabs and Druze in Israel identify with their identity as Israeli Arab and Israeli Druze. In the second chapter, guided by the Matrix Language Turnover Hypothesis, the author considers codeswitching, with Arabic as the matrix language, as the classic type used by Israeli Arab citizens. And codeswitching with Arabic and Hebrew together setting the morphosyntactic frame is seen as the composite codeswitching adopted by Druze speakers. Moreover, this composite codeswitching can result in a mixed language, which is labelled as Israbic in this book. The third chapter tests Israbic against a mixed language model and compares Israbic to other mixed languages in the world. It is found that Israbic displays a composite structure in entire components of its morphosyntactic frame and resembles most a northern Australian language Gurindji Kriol in its development and structure. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the relationship between codeswitching and sociopolitical identity among three sectors: Christians, Muslims, and Druze. The author introduces a theoretical model called The Identity Code Model (ICM) that would facilitate the analysis of codeswitching as an index and construct of sociopolitical identity. According to the ICM, the social and political identification with the state culture would lead to composite codeswitching. Both qualitative and quantitative methods, along with the application of the ICM, have been used to reveal different codeswitching behaviors, which are closely related to speakers' sociopolitical identity and attitude towards the dominant culture. In the concluding chapter, Kheir compares the language of Israeli Druze and the Druze of the Golan Heights, who moved from Syrian to Israeli control following the Six-Day War in 1967. This chapter explores how ‘sandwiched’ communities between two dichotomous sides, with the former adopting the Israeli national consciousness and the latter Syrian nationalism, display varying degrees of affiliation with the dominant culture through different codeswitching styles. The Druze of the Golan Heights who maintain Arabic as the matrix language would sometimes violate the assimilation rule in Hebrew, but the Israeli Druze prefer the composite language formation to achieve coalition-building.
Drawing insights from intersubjective contact linguistics, this book explores Palestinian Arabic and Israeli Hebrew codeswitching in under-researched Arabic communities, and by applying the ICM model in conflict language settings, the book insightfully reveals how language behaviors, culture, belonging, and sociopolitical identity are closely connected through the linguistic behaviors of codeswitching, which signal as well as construct sociopolitical identities.
