The first part of this course exposes the students to variation within the Palestinian linguistic space and prepares them for linguistic fieldwork. Students will listen, under guidance, to different Palestinian varieties – Bedouin (Negev, Galilee, Judean desert); rural (Triangle, Galilee, villages around Ramallah); urban (Jerusalem, Haifa, Hebron); communal varieties (Christian, Jewish, Druze) in order to infer major distinctions.  A systematic outline of cross-dialectal features will be presented in linguistic terminology (as acquired in the course Arabic Dialectology, sem. A).

In the second part of the course, basic fieldwork methodology will be provided and key issues in Palestinian dialectology will be introduced, based on existing literature. We will focus on how profoundly socio-cultural aspects differentiate the tiny Palestinian linguistic region. Concepts of ‘isogloss’, ‘shared innovation’, ‘grammaticalization’, ‘sub-stratum’, ‘Sprachbund’, ‘linguistic koiné’ will be applied to sketch a concrete dialectal map of the region, with some historical consideration of the impact of sub-stratum languages and of relations with other varieties outside the Palestinian region.

AIMS: Students will become aware of the linguistic variety existing within ‘Palestinian’ - through systematic knowledge of specific linguistic features and concrete fieldwork – and of the effect of socio-cultural factors on its profile. Student will be able to conduct individual fieldwork with native speakers, applying fieldwork skills in recording, transcribing and translating material. They will be able to recognize features and classify dialectal types for synchronic analysis and diachronic reconstruction. They will have a critical outline of the history of Palestinian dialectology, enabling them to continue comparative and dialectological research.