FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

Here’s a complex one: Palestinian Arabic /jīl/ to mean not only ‘generation’ as in other varieties of Arabic, but also ‘age’ — derived from the Hebrew cognate /gil/ which means ‘age.’ There’s more complications — just ask me.

Uri Horesh is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic and Persian at the University of St Andrews and an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. They hold a PhD in Sociolinguistics from the University of Essex (2014) and are interested in Sociolinguistics, particularly language variation and change and language contact in the Middle East, historical sociolinguistics, Arabic, Hebrew and Yiddish dialectology. Contact between pairs of these languages have led to many contact-induced phenomena, both in grammar and in lexicon, and it is the latter that ties Uri’s research to the study of neologisms. They are a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics (2019) and a co-author of the textbook Arabic Sociolinguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2022). https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/modern-languages/people/arabic/uh4/