Yasmine Abou Taha | Department of Historical and Cultural Studies

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Supervisor(s)

Atiqa Hachimi

I am a postdoctoral fellow, working broadly on Palestinian national identity and language. I completed my Ph.D. in Linguistics in July 2022 at the University of Ottawa. My Ph.D. research was based on a ground-breaking sociolinguistic study of Levantine Arabic, focusing on contact between two under-studied varieties, Lebanese Arabic, the majority variety spoken in Beirut, and Palestinian Arabic, the minority variety spoken by the local refugee population. The research materials that I used comprised extensive corpora of interviews with 39 Palestinian and 27 Lebanese speakers I recorded, as well as diachronic data sources, including the Palestinian Oral History Archive and a series of plays belonging to the Lebanese Popular Theatre Corpus. My thesis was recommended for a prize by the examining committee.

During my Ph.D., I taught a course on bilingualism and worked as a graduate mentor, teaching assistant and research assistant. I additionally received two departmental awards given to high-performing students. I also have a growing publication record, particularly book chapters, and I am currently working on publishing chapters from my thesis. In addition to my training in linguistics, I have a master’s background in language, identity and gender.

My research interests are broadly in Arabic (socio)linguistics and language, gender and identity, particularly among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. I am also interested in the sociology of (forced) migration, Palestinian women in refugee camps and their oral testimonies of displacement, as well as oral history as a research method.

Building on the quantitative findings of my Ph.D. thesis and judiciously combining synchronic and diachronic data sources, my postdoctoral research aims to address how Palestinian speakers in Lebanon from different immigrant generations manipulate linguistic variation and change to index multiple social meanings and to project multifaceted social identities.

Education

B.A., M.A. (American University of Beirut)
Ph.D. (University of Ottawa)