The development of literacy in selected bilingual societies was investigated. Historical and comparative studies were conducted of medieval Jewish communities, the Navajo community, a northern New Mexico village, and the countries of Paraguay and Tonga. The goal of the case studies was to develop a model for the development of literacy in the…

Describes the linguistic situation in Israel and the language teaching policies and practices in Israeli schools. Policy is dominated by the ideological role and practical value of Hebrew, and is further driven by the large numbers of non-Jewish minorities, the status of English as a world language, and the political values of Arabic. (21…

Focuses on language restoration in a situation where people start again to use a language as the language of the home and to speak it to newborn children after a period when these uses were extinct. Specifically considers the conditions accounting for Hebrew language revitalization and compares this situation with efforts to revitalize the Maori…

This book focuses on the practice and ideology of the languages of Israel, examining the extent to which the present linguistic pattern may be attributed to explicit language-planning activities. The chapters give balanced analyses of the history and current status of the revitalized national language, Hebrew; of the other official language,…

Israel is fertile ground for research in multilingualism. Revitalization of Hebrew resulted in a tendency for ideological and instrumentally-motivated monolingualism to replace earlier multilingual patterns, even in the context of pressure for language shift by Arabic, Russian, Yiddish, and other languages, and Hebrew's competition with English in…