RT Article
T1 “Mock Jewish” in Early Twentieth-Century Tunisia: Linguistic Form and Social Meaning
JF Arabica
VO 68
IS 2/3
SP 216
OP 280
A1 Koerber, Benjamin
LA English
PB Brill
YR 2021
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1765372356
AB Abstract The article presents a sociolinguistic profile of “Mock Jewish,” or the stylized varieties of Judeo-Arabic deployed for humorous purposes in early twentieth-century Tunisian public culture. We assembled a corpus of texts from both print and audio-visual media, including newspaper columns, television and radio performances, folktales, and plays, in which “Jewish” (yahūdī) or “Israelite” (isrāʾīlī) voices are stylized with exaggerated forms of linguistic difference. The purpose of the analysis is not to evaluate the inauthenticity of Mock Jewish vis-à-vis Judeo-Arabic proper, but to understand how performers deploy these markedly “Jewish” stylistic tactics to create diverse social meanings and assess the effects of these performances on language and society. We argue that Mock Jewish forms part of the broader “ideologies of linguistic differentiation” that construct Jewish speech as separate and distinct from non-Jewish varieties. However, the performances of Mock Jewish are not limited to sectarian polemic, but engage diverse targets, derive from different motivations, and provoke divergent responses from audiences.
K1 Arabic dialects
K1 Style
K1 language ideology
K1 mock languages
K1 Tunisia
K1 Judeo-Arabic
DO 10.1163/15700585-12341598