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…

This paper provides a sociolinguistic discussion of the language situation in Israel, based on relevant linguistic and Hebraic literature and on the author's two year visit to the area. The author discusses the background and use of the many different languages spoken in the country; the function of each language is described. Characteristics of…

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…