Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew

Israeli Hebrew is a spoken language, ''reinvented'' over the last century. It has responded to the new social and technological demands of globalization with a vigorously developing multisourced lexicon, enriched by foreign language contact. In this detailed and rigorous study, the author provides a principled classification of neologisms, their semantic fields and the roles of source languages, along with a sociolinguistic study of the attitudes of ''purists'' and ordinary native speakers in the tension between linguistic creativity and the preservation of a distinct language identity.