page_title: Hebrew language
section_title: Modern Hebrew
hierarchical_section_title: Hebrew language / History / Modern Hebrew
caption_attribution_description: כביש 431 לקראת מחלף ענבה
context_page_description: Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language native to Israel. In 2013, Modern Hebrew was spoken by over nine million people worldwide. Historically, it is regarded as the language of the Israelites and their ancestors, although the language was not referred to by the name "Hebrew" in the Tanakh itself. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date to the 10th century BCE. Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family, and is the only Canaanite language still spoken and the only truly successful example of a revived dead language.
  Hebrew ceased to be an everyday spoken language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining since the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Aramaic and, to a lesser extent, Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among elites and immigrants. Hebrew survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce and poetry. With the rise of Zionism in the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language, becoming the main language of the Yishuv and subsequently of the State of Israel.
context_section_description: Standard Hebrew, as developed by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, was based on Mishnaic spelling and Sephardi Hebrew pronunciation. However, the earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew had Yiddish as their native language and often introduced calques from Yiddish and phono-semantic matchings of international words.
  Despite using Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation as its primary basis, modern Israeli Hebrew has adapted to Ashkenazi Hebrew phonology in some respects, mainly the following:
  the elimination of pharyngeal articulation in the letters chet (ח‎) and ayin ( ע‎) by most Hebrew speakers.
  the conversion of (ר‎) /r/ from an alveolar flap [ɾ] to a voiced uvular fricative [ʁ] or uvular trill [ʀ], by most of the speakers, like in most varieties of standard German or Yiddish. see Guttural R
  the pronunciation (by many speakers) of tzere  ֵ ‎ as [eɪ] in some contexts (sifréj and téjša instead of Sephardic sifré and tésha)
  the partial elimination of vocal Shva  ְ ‎ (zmán instead of Sephardic zĕman)
  in popular speech, penultimate stress in proper names (Dvóra instead of Dĕvorá; Yehúda instead of Yĕhudá) and some other words
  similarly in popular speech, penultimate stress in verb forms with a second person plural suffix (katávtem "you wrote" instead of kĕtavtém).
  The vocabulary of Israeli Hebrew is much larger than that of earlier periods. According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann:
  The number of attested Biblical Hebrew words is 8198, of which some 2000 are hapax legomena (the number of Biblical Hebrew roots, on which many of these words are based, is 2099). The number of attested Rabbinic Hebrew words is less than 20,000, of which (i) 7879 are Rabbinic par excellence, i.e. they did not appear in the Old Testament (the number of new Rabbinic Hebrew roots is 805); (ii) around 6000 are a subset of Biblical Hebrew; and (iii) several thousand are Aramaic words which can have a Hebrew form. Medieval Hebrew added 6421 words to (Modern) Hebrew. The approximate number of new lexical items in Israeli is 17,000 (cf. 14,762 in Even-Shoshan 1970 [...]). With the inclusion of foreign and technical terms [...], the total number of Israeli words, including words of biblical, rabbinic and medieval descent, is more than 60,000.
  In Israel, Modern Hebrew is currently taught in institutions called Ulpanim (singular: Ulpan). There are government-owned, as well as private, Ulpanim offering online courses and face-to-face programs.
caption: Hebrew, Arabic and English multilingual signs on an Israeli highway
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