Department of Hebrew Language
Subject: A sociolinguistic profile of the Jewish communities from Greater Tunis as heritage speakers
Supervisor: Prof. Ofra Tirosh-Becker
Abstract: The present project aims at the sociolinguistic description of the Judeo-Arabic (henceforth JA) heritage speech communities from the Greater Tunis (namely, the metropolitan area that includes the four governorates of Tunis, Ariana, Manouba, and Ben Arous) in migratory settings (i.e., Israel and France). The proposed project is extremely urgent given the advanced age of the speakers, their lack of intergenerational transmission, and the poor institutional support given to them. This will be one of the last chances to document endangered Judeo-Arabic varieties (mainly spoken JA of Ariana and La Goulette) that so far have not been subject to any kind of linguistic study. Furthermore, this research would significantly contribute to the fields of Arabic and JA dialectology and historical linguistics, and to Arabic sociolinguistics (e.g., the description of North-African spoken varieties as heritage languages). After David Cohen’s seminal works (1964, 1975), the pre-migration and post-migration spoken JA of Tunis has been intermittently studied, both from a dialectological point of view and from a sociolinguistic one. Apart from the above-mentioned works and Daniel’s PhD thesis (2020), in which he focuses on the language used in the 19th and 20th centuries journals, there is no study that focuses exclusively on the spoken JA of Tunis. As mentioned before, we have no linguistic studies on the JA varieties spoken in the Greater Tunis (e.g., from Ariana, La Goulette, etc.) (henceforth GJA). As for a sociolinguistic analysis of the Tunisian spoken JA, apart from one study that focuses on the so-called ‘Mock Jewish Arabic’ in Tunisia (Koerber 2021), nothing is to be found. However, a similar work has been carried out by D’Anna in his study of the Tunisian community of Chebba in Sicily (D’Anna 2017) and in Sanavia’s master’s thesis, which focuses on discourse-related contact scenarios in the spoken JA of Yefren (Libya) in Israel (Sanavia 2021). I plan to achieve the hereby illustrated goal through accurate fieldwork activities in Israel, France, and hopefully in Tunisia (through first-hand interviews). The parallel focus on these different settings will shed light on the expected outputs of the language contact between various hegemonic languages (e.g., Modern Hebrew and French) and GJA, thus highlighting the alleged differences in the linguistic repertoires of these communities. As for the Israeli setting, the results of this study would provide significant insights for the role that Modern Hebrew, Zionism and the shaping of the Israeli society, in the last century, had and still have on Jewish communities that immigrated to the State of Israel. In particular, given their biographical nature the interviews are of significant importance for a thorough study of the cultures and habits of contemporary Mizrahi Jewry (in this case, Tunisian Jewry) both in their previous homeland and in the new ones. Extensive periods of research in cities with large GJA speaking communities (e.g., Netanya) will enable us to understand the way these languages are displayed in the public arena. The methodological approach that I hereby adopt is that of the contact scenario approach applied to heritage languages under the lens of the speaker perspective (Aalberse et al 2019: 41-42), in line with the current sociolinguistic approaches to heritage languages. The fieldwork activity will help us overcome the methodological caveat of the paucity of data at our disposal, which, at present, consist of some audio-visual documents available in the lešon ha-bayit project website. Such an interdisciplinary study has the potential of stimulating within the scientific community of JA studies a dialogue with other research projects that are concerned with other heritage languages in different migratory contexts (e.g., the Canadian project Heritage Language Variation and Change directed by Professor Naomi Nagy). This study may prepare the ground for a future broader project that will be concerned with heritage languages in Israel, whose goal will be to prevent the heritage of these communities from disappearing without proper documentation. The need for such projects is clear and is consistent with additional studies on other immigrant and heritage languages in Israel (e.g., Lucchetti 2023). I plan to share the data on an open-access platform, which will be determined at a later stage, thus allowing other researchers and the speakers themselves access to this unique material.
Bio: I am Eduardo Balbo and I am currently a PhD student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Hebrew Language. I am currently dealing with Arabic sociolinguistics and dialectology, focusing on the spoken varieties of Tunisian Jews in migratory settings (i.e., Israel and France). My academic interests range from linguistics, and literature and psychology. I am very active both in the academic context and in the society in general. My aim is to also be active within the community of speakers that help me with my research and to find a way to giving them back what the data they provide me with, in a shape that will help their community in terms of support and wellbeing. I love to work in harmony with groups of people whose interests diverge from mine, in order to get precious feedback that can help me grow from an academic and from a personal point of view.
President's Scholarship 2023/2024