People tend to craft a signature that is clearly distinguishable from others’ signatures and thus difficult to forge. This highlights the important meaning associated with signing one’s name on a document and, thus, supports the premise of a strong relationship between signatures and identity. We hypothesize that signing one’s name in his mother tongue reflects one’s identification with his social group.
In this research, we examined the relationship between the vitality of language and identity as reflected in what language do Palestinian Arab students of higher education in Israel sign their own handwritten signature. In the reality of Israel, there are strong pressures towards ‘Hebraization’ among Palestinians. This places a further burden on them, as Hebrew is the dominant language in the public sphere of Israel.
Do Palestinian Arabs sign in Arabic, their mother tongue and native first language (L1) but still the language of minority for Palestinian Arabs in Israel? In Hebrew, their second language (L2) but the language of the dominant majority on Israel and the language of most official documents if not all? In English, the third language (L3) for those in Israel? Or in a symbolic logographic manner?
In the current study we have asked 843 Palestinian multilingual Arab students of higher education in northern, central, and southern Israel to sign their own handwritten signature. Their signatures were classified based on the signature language into Arabic, Hebrew, English and Symbolic-Logographic (difficult to be classified into a specific language). As in Figure 1 about 81% of the signatures were not in Arabic the native firs language. The findings were unpredictable and may trigger further investigation of the interplay of multilingualism and majority/minority language interplay.