ABSTRACT
The most prevalent manifestation of bilingualism in Israel concerns the retention by new immigrants of their languages of origin. It is a transitional bilingualism, since Israeli-born children, with a few notable exceptions, are immersed in Hebrew, which is, used everywhere. This chapter describes a specific case of bilingualism within a rural population of Moroccan origin in Israel. The elders of Romema, like so many other Moroccan immigrants, easily recognized familiar words and phrases in Israeli Hebrew, and this undoubtedly facilitated the acquisition of their new required language. The chapter focuses on a comparison between Jewish and Arab high school students in Israel and their respective ethnolinguistic vitality and language attitudes, Rand Kraemer and E. Olshtain found that "Arab students who saw their group prestige and political power as lower had a higher evaluation of their language." Interpreting this fact according to social identity theory, they cite the following principle as formulated by H. Tajfel.
