Modern Hebrew (, or ), also known as Israeli Hebrew or simply Hebrew, is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. It is the only extant Canaanite language of the Semitic language family, as well as one of the oldest attested languages to be spoken as a first language in the modern day, on account of Hebrew being attested since the 2nd millennium BC. It uses the Hebrew Alphabet, an abjad script written from right-to-left. The current standard was codified as part of the revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now serves as the official and national language of the State of Israel, where it is predominantly spoken by its over 10 million people. Thus, Modern Hebrew is nearly universally regarded as the most successful instance of language revitalization in history.
A Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew was spoken since antiquity as the vernacular of the Israelites until around the 3rd century BCE, when it was supplanted in the Levant by a western dialect of the Aramaic language and elsewhere by the local or dominant languages of the regions Jews migrated to, and later by Judeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Spanish, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages. Although Hebrew continued to be used for Jewish liturgy, poetry and literature, and written correspondence, it became extinct as a natively spoken language.
By the late 19th century, Russian-Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had begun a popular movement to revive Hebrew as an everyday language, motivated by his desire to preserve Hebrew literature and establish a distinct Jewish nationality and nationalism in the context of Zionism. Soon after, a large number of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish speakers were murdered in the HolocaustSolomon Birnbaum, Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache (4., erg. Aufl., Hamburg: Buske, 1984), p. 3. or fled to Israel, and many speakers of Judeo-Arabic emigrated to Israel in the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, where many would adapt to Modern Hebrew.
Currently, Hebrew is spoken by over 10 million people, counting native, fluent, and non-fluent speakers. Over 6.5 million of these speak it as their native language, the overwhelming majority of whom are Jews who were born in Israel. The rest is split: 2 million are immigrants to Israel; 1.5 million are Israeli Arabs, whose first language is usually Arabic; and half a million are expatriate Israelis or diaspora Jews.
Under Israeli law, the organization that officially directs the development of Modern Hebrew is the Academy of the Hebrew Language, headquartered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Name The most common scholarly term for the language is "Modern Hebrew" (). Most people refer to it simply as "Hebrew" ( ).; quote: "Most people refer to Israeli Hebrew simply as Hebrew. Hebrew is a broad term, which includes Hebrew as it was spoken and written in different periods of time and according to most of the researchers as it is spoken and written in Israel and elsewhere today. Several names have been proposed for the language spoken in Israel nowadays, Modern Hebrew is the most common one, addressing the latest spoken language variety in Israel (Berman 1978, Saenz-Badillos 1993:269, Coffin-Amir & Bolozky 2005, Schwarzwald 2009:61). The emergence of a new language in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century was associated with debates regarding the characteristics of that language.... Not all scholars supported the term Modern Hebrew for the new language. Rosén (1977:17) rejected the term Modern Hebrew, since linguistically he claimed that 'modern' should represent a linguistic entity that should command autonomy towards everything that preceded it, while this was not the case in the new emerging language. He also rejected the term Neo-Hebrew, because the prefix 'neo' had been previously used for Mishnaic and Medieval Hebrew (Rosén 1977:15–16), additionally, he rejected the term Spoken Hebrew as one of the possible proposals (Rosén 1977:18). Rosén supported the term Israeli Hebrew as in his opinion it represented the non-chronological nature of Hebrew, as well as its territorial independence (Rosén 1977:18). Rosén then adopted the term Contemporary Hebrew from Téne (1968) for its neutrality, and suggested the broadening of this term to Contemporary Israeli Hebrew (Rosén 1977:19)"
The term "Modern Hebrew" has been described as "somewhat problematic"; quote: The language with which we are concerned in this contribution is also known by the names Contemporary Hebrew and Modern Hebrew, both somewhat problematic terms as they rely on the notion of an unambiguous periodization separating Classical or Biblical Hebrew from the present-day language. We follow instead the now widely-used label coined by Rosén (1955), Israeli Hebrew, to denote the link between the emergence of a Hebrew vernacular and the emergence of an Israeli national identity in Israel/Palestine in the early twentieth century." as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew. () supported the now widely used term "Israeli Hebrew" on the basis that it "represented the non-chronological nature of Hebrew". In 1999, Israeli linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposed the term "Israeli" to represent the multiple origins of the language.
Background
The history of the Hebrew language can be divided into four major periods:Hebrew language Encyclopædia Britannica
Biblical Hebrew, until about the 3rd century BCE; the language of most of the Hebrew Bible Mishnaic Hebrew, the language of the Mishnah and Talmud Medieval Hebrew, from about the 6th to the 18th century CE Modern Hebrew, from the 19th century to the present, the language of the modern State of Israel
Jewish contemporary sources describe Hebrew flourishing as a spoken language in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, during about 1200 to 586 BCE.אברהם בן יוסף ,מבוא לתולדות הלשון העברית (Avraham ben-Yosef, Introduction to the History of the Hebrew Language), page 38, אור-עם, Tel Aviv, 1981. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew remained a spoken vernacular following the Babylonian captivity, when Old Aramaic became the predominant international language in the region.
Hebrew died out as a vernacular language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE, which devastated the population of Judea. After the exile, Hebrew became restricted to liturgical and literary use.Sáenz-Badillos, Ángel and John Elwolde: "There is general agreement that two main periods of RH (Rabbinical Hebrew) can be distinguished. The first, which lasted until the close of the Tannaitic era (around 200 CE), is characterized by RH as a spoken language gradually developing into a literary medium in which the Mishnah, Tosefta, baraitot and Tannaitic midrashim would be composed. The second stage begins with the Amoraim and sees RH being replaced by Aramaic as the spoken vernacular, surviving only as a literary language. Then it continued to be used in later rabbinic writings until the tenth century in, for example, the Hebrew portions of the two Talmuds and in midrashic and haggadic literature."
Revival Hebrew had been spoken at various times and for many purposes throughout the Diaspora. During the Old Yishuv, it had developed into a spoken lingua franca among Palestinian Jews.Tudor Parfitt; The Contribution of the old Yishuv to the Revival of Hebrew, Journal of Semitic Studies, Volume XXIX, Issue 2, 1 October 1984, Pages 255–265, https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/XXIX.2.255 Eliezer Ben-Yehuda then led a revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Modern Hebrew used Biblical Hebrew morphemes, Mishnaic spelling and grammar, and Sephardic pronunciation. Its acceptance by the early Jewish immigrants to Ottoman Palestine was caused primarily by support from the organisations of Edmond James de Rothschild in the 1880s and the official status it received in the 1922 constitution of the British Mandate for Palestine., "What would the future of Hebrew have been, had not the British Mandate in 1919 accepted it as one of the three official languages of Palestine, at a time when the number of people speaking Hebrew as an everyday language was less than 20,000?": "In retrospect, [Hobsbawm's] question should be rephrased, substituting the Rothschild house for the British state and the 1880s for 1919. For by the time the British conquered Palestine, Hebrew had become the everyday language of a small but well-entrenched community."Palestine Mandate (1922): "English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the official languages of Palestine" Ben-Yehuda codified and planned Modern Hebrew using 8,000 words from the Bible and 20,000 words from rabbinical commentaries. Many new words were borrowed from Arabic, due to the language's common Semitic roots with Hebrew, but changed to fit Hebrew phonology and grammar, for example the words (sing.) and (pl.) are now applied to 'socks', a diminutive of the Arabic ('socks').Cf. Rabbi Hai Gaon's commentary on Mishnah Kelim 27:6, where () was used formerly for the same, and had the equivalent meaning of the Arabic word ('stockings'; 'socks'). In addition, early Jewish immigrants, borrowing from the local Arabs, and later immigrants from Arab lands introduced many nouns as loanwords from Arabic (such as nana, , , , , lubiya, hummus, , , etc.), as well as much of Modern Hebrew's slang. Despite Ben-Yehuda's fame as the renewer of Hebrew, the most productive renewer of Hebrew words was poet Haim Nahman Bialik.