• Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz
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    2 days ago

    A lot of the Palestinians who live in northern isreal descend at least partly if not chiefly from Samaritans who converted to Islam and started speaking Arabic instead of Samaritan Hebrew. The modern Samaritans wouldn’t call themselves Palestinians however. They have their own identity and many of them don’t speak Arabic.

    • shaserlark@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Sorry what? Palestinian Arabic is what people no matter if Jewish, Christian, Druze, Muslim, … have been speaking in Palestine. People haven’t been speaking Hebrew there since some thousands of years save for religious purposes. This is equivalent to Italians not speaking Latin, Orthodox people not speaking Old Church Slavonic in every day life. This got only changed in the course of the colonization of Palestine. I recommend Israeli historian Ilan Pappe who wrote a very informative book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine where the language topic and demographics before Zionist colonialism are also discussed.

      • Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz
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        2 days ago

        That’s correct. The Samaritans used to speak Samaritan Hebrew, then Samaritan Aramaic and then Palestinian Arabic which was then the main language for at least 800 years. However as I understand they have now mostly switched to Hebrew as they have integrated into the isreali state. This is however a very modern phenomenon.