Pharyngeal Beauty and Depharyngealized Geek: Performing ethnicity on Israeli reality TV

Among Israelis, Jewish ethnicity is usually understood as a dichotomy between Ashkenazi Jews (of European descent) and Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern descent). The feature most stereotypically associated with Mizrahis is the production of the pharyngeal segments ([ʕ] and [ħ]), which all extant research suggests has been lost in the speech of most contemporary Israelis. In this chapter I examine Israeli metalinguistic discourse, and demonstrate that, despite the reported infrequency of pharyngealization, it is highly salient in the speech community. I argue that pharyngealization is enregistered as a Mizrahi feature, and that it is a stylistic resource with a rich set of indexical meanings that goes far beyond an ethnic marker. Using data from two Israeli reality TV shows, I show that participants on these shows, who do not consistently pharyngealize, do so when performing attributes associated with a stereotypical Mizrahi persona.