Final Task

Final Task: Option A

I have chosen to complete Option A for my Final Task assignment and the three papers that I have decided to summarize and synthesize as part of this task are as follows: 1. Elana Shohamy’s Linguistic Landscape regular paper titled “Russian in the Israeli Linguistic Landscape”; 2. Ofra Inbar’s Assessment regular paper titled “The US Citizenship Test and Russian immigrants’ views towards this testing instrument”; 3. Elana Shohamy’s Language Policy Seminar paper titled “Russian language in Israel and Russian immigrants’ views towards making it the third official language of Israel”. I will begin by summarizing Elana Shohamy’s Linguistic Landscape paper titled “Russian in the Israeli Linguistic Landscape”.

This paper begins by bringing forth the notion that a big immigration wave occurred in the early 1990’s of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union to Israel. One of the reasons why so many Russians decided to come to Israel versus the United States is because the United States began having more strict laws for immigration in the early 90’s, while Israel continued to receive immigrants without enforcing strict immigration rules. Because there are so many Russian speaking people living in Israel, businesses that cater to the Russian speaking public are very common. For my project, I decided to focus on Russian businesses in Israel. I wasn’t looking for the businesses to be exclusively for Russian people, but I was interested in the businesses’ desires to serve a Russian speaking clientele. The research question for my project was as follows: “What is the main motivation of business owners in Israel in incorporating the Russian language into their businesses? Is it to enable understanding by Russian-speaking customers or rather to create a Russian atmosphere?

My hypothesis was that the main purpose of utilizing the Russian language in Israeli businesses is to create a Russian atmosphere. This hypothesis was based on my experience of having...