עִבְרִית 'Ivrit
Pronunciation [ʔivˈrit] (standard Israeli), [ʕivˈɾiːt] (standard Israeli (Sephardi)), [ʕibˈriːθ] (Iraqi), [ʕivˈriːθ] Yemenite, [ˈivʀis] (Ashkenazi)
Spoken in Israel
Global (as a liturgical language for Judaism)
Total speakers 7 million in Israel;
200,000 (approx.) in the United States speak Hebrew at home1

1United States Census 2000 PHC-T-37. Ability to Speak English by Language Spoken at Home: 2000. Table 1a.PDF (11.8 KiB)

Extinct as a regularly spoken language by the 4th century CE, but survived as a liturgical and literary language; revived in the 1880s

Language family
Writing system Hebrew alphabet
Official status
Official language in Template:Flag
Regulated by Academy of the Hebrew Language
האקדמיה ללשון העברית(HaAqademia LaLashon Ha‘Ivrit)
Language codes
ISO 639-1 he
ISO 639-2 heb
ISO 639-3 either:Template:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelistTemplate:Infobox Language/codelist

Hebrew (עִבְרִית, ‘Ivrit) is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Modern Hebrew is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Classical Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world. It is one of the official languages of Israel, along with Arabic. Ancient Hebrew is also the liturgical tongue of the Samaritans, while modern Hebrew or Palestinian Arabic is their vernacular, though today fewer than a thousand Samaritans remain. As a foreign language it is studied mostly by Jews and students of Judaism and Israel, archaeologists and linguists specializing in the Middle East and its civilizations, by theologians, and in Christian seminaries.

The modern word "Hebrew" is derived from the word "ivri" which in turn may be based upon the root "`avar" (עבר) meaning "to cross over". The related name Ever occurs in Genesis 10:21 and possibly means "the one who traverses". In the Bible "Hebrew" is called Yehudith (יהודית) because Judah (Yehuda) was the surviving kingdom at the time of the quotation, late 8th century BCE (Is 36, 2 Kings 18). In Isaiah 19:18, it is also called the "Language of Canaan" (שְׂפַת כְּנַעַן).



As a language, Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. Hebrew (Israel) and Moabite (Jordan) are Southern Canaanite while Phoenician (Lebanon) is Northern Canaanite. Canaanite is closely related to Aramaic and to a lesser extent South-Central Arabic. Whereas other Canaanite languages and dialects have become extinct, Hebrew has survived. Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in Canaan from the 10th century BCE until the Babylonian exile.

Around the 6th century BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the ancient Kingdom of Judah, destroying much of Jerusalem and exiling its population far to the East in Babylon. During the Babylonian captivity, many Israelites were enslaved within the Babylonian Empire and learned the Aramaic language of their captors. The Babylonians had taken mainly the governing classes of Israel while leaving behind in Israel presumably more-compliant farmers and laborers to work the land. Thus for a significant period, the Jewish elite became influenced by Aramaic.[1] (see below, Aramaic spoken among Israelites).

After Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, he released the Jewish people from captivity. The King of Kings or Great King of Persia, later gave the Israelites permission to return. Hebrew came to be spoken alongside new dialects of Hebrew and a local version of Aramaic. Yet, Aramaic represented the hated language of slavery, conquest, and occupation; while Hebrew remained the language of Israel's history and national pride. Preserved largely by the remant in Israel proper, Hebrew continued to be a thriving language until shortly before the Byzantine era.






Within Semitic, the Northwest Semitic languages formed around the 3rd millennium BCE, grouped with the Arabic languages as Central Semitic. The Canaanite languages are a group within Northwest Semitic, emerging in the 2nd millennium BCE in the Levant, gradually separating from Aramaic and Ugaritic.


Gezer calendar and other archaic inscriptions






Classical Hebrew

In its widest sense, Classical Hebrew means the spoken language of ancient Israel flourishing between the 10th century BCE and the turn of the 4th century CE.[3] It comprises several evolving and overlapping dialects. The phases of Classical Hebrew are often named after important literary works associated with them.

  • Biblical Hebrew around the 6th century BCE, corresponding to the Babylonian Exile and represented by the bulk of the Hebrew Bible that attains much of its present form around this time. Also called Classical Biblical Hebrew (or Classical Hebrew in the narrowest sense).

Sometimes the above phases of spoken Classical Hebrew are simplified into "Biblical Hebrew" (including several dialects from the tenth century BCE to 2nd century BCE and extant in certain Dead Sea Scrolls) and "Mishnaic Hebrew" (including several dialects from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE and extant in certain other Dead Sea Scrolls).[4] However today, most Hebrew linguists classify Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew as a set of dialects evolving out of Late Biblical Hebrew and into Mishnaic Hebrew, thus including elements from both but remaining distinct from either.[5] By the start of the Byzantine Period in the 4th century CE, Classical Hebrew ceases as a regularly spoken language, roughly a century after the publication of the Mishnah, apparently declining since the aftermath of the catastrophic Bar Kokhba War around 135 CE.

Mishnah and Talmud





Medieval Hebrew

File:Aleppo codex.jpg






Liturgical use

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Modern Hebrew



Eliezer Ben-Yehuda at his desk in Jerusalem - c1912

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

The literary and narrative use of Hebrew was revived beginning with the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement. The first secular periodical in Hebrew, Hameassef (The Gatherer), was published by Maskilim literati in Königsberg from 1783 onwards.[6] In the mid-19th century, publications of several Eastern European Hebrew-language newspapers (e.g. HaMagid, founded in Lyck, Prussia, in 1856) multiplied. Prominent poets were Chaim Nachman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky; there were also novels written in the language.

The revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue was initiated by the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922) (אליעזר בן–יהודה). He joined the Jewish national movement and in 1881 immigrated to Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora "shtetl" lifestyle, Ben-Yehuda set out to develop tools for making the literary and liturgical language into everyday spoken language.




Russia and the Soviet Union




Birobidzhan Jewish National University works in cooperation with the local Jewish community of Birobidzhan. The university is unique in the Russian Far East. The basis of the training course is study of the Hebrew language, history and classic Jewish texts.[11] In recent years, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast has grown interested in its Jewish roots. Students study Hebrew and Yiddish at a Jewish school and Birobidzhan Jewish National University. In 1989, the Jewish center founded its Sunday school, where children study Yiddish, learn folk Jewish dance, and learn about the history of Israel. The Israeli government helps fund the program.[12] Chief Rabbi Mordechai Scheiner has commended the progress at School No. 2, Birobidjan's Jewish public school with 670 students, 30 percent of whom are Jewish. Pupils learn about Jewish history, and the Hebrew and Yiddish languages.[13]

Modern Israeli Hebrew

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 tongue and often brought into Hebrew idioms and literal translations from Yiddish. Similarly, the language as spoken in Israel has adapted to Ashkenazi Hebrew phonology in the following respects:

  • the elimination of pharyngeal articulation in the letters chet and ayin
  • the conversion of /r/ from an alveolar flap ([ɾ]) to a voiced uvular fricative ([ʁ]) or trill ([ʀ]) (see Guttural R)
  • the pronunciation (by many speakers) of tzere as [eɪ] in some contexts (sifrey and teysha instead of Sephardic sifré and tésha' )


Although the vast majority of scholars see Modern Hebrew as a direct continuation of Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, while conceding that it has acquired some European vocabulary and syntactical features, in much the same way as Modern Standard Arabic[15] (or even more so, dialects such as Moroccan Arabic), two dissenting views are as follows:



Regional dialects

According to Ethnologues, the currently spoken dialects of Hebrew are "Standard Hebrew (Modern Israeli Hebrew)", Sephardi Hebrew, Oriental Hebrew or Mizrahi Hebrew and Yemenite Hebrew". These refer to two varieties used for actual communication by native speakers in Israel; they differ mainly in pronunciation, and hardly in any other way.

Immigrants to Israel are encouraged to adopt "Standard Hebrew" as their daily language. Phonologically, this "dialect" may most accurately be described as an amalgam of pronunciations preserving Sephardic vowel sounds and some Ashkenazic consonant sounds with Yiddish-style influence, its recurring feature being simplification of differences among a wide array of pronunciations. This simplifying tendency also accounts for the collapse of the Ashkenazic [t] and [s] allophones of ת (/t/) into the single phone [t]. Most Sephardic and Mizrahi dialects share this feature, though some (such as those of Iraq and Yemen) differentiate between these two pronunciations as /t/ and /θ/. Within Israel, however, the pronunciation of Hebrew more often reflects the diasporic origin of the individual speaker, rather than the specific recommendations of the Academy. For this reason, over half the population pronounces ר as [ʀ] (a uvular trill, as in Yiddish and French) or as [ʁ] (a voiced uvular fricative, as in Standard German), rather than as [r], an alveolar trill, as in Spanish and Italian. The pronunciation of this phoneme is often used among Israelis as a shibboleth or determinant when ascertaining the national origin of perceived foreigners.


It was formerly the case that the inhabitants of the north of Israel pronounced beth rafe (בי"ת רפה, bet without dagesh, literally loose beth: ב) as /b/ instead of /v/, in accordance with the conservative Sephardic pronunciation . This was regarded as rustic and has since disappeared. It is said that one can tell an inhabitant of Jerusalem by the pronunciation of the word for two hundred as "ma'atayim" (מאתיים, as distinct from "matayim", as heard elsewhere in the country). Today, Israeli Hebrew is virtually uniform, the only noticeable variation being along ethnic lines. It is widely felt that these differences, too, have been disappearing among the younger generation.


Aramaic is a North-West Semitic language, like Canaanite. Its name derives either from "Aram Naharayim" in Upper Mesopotamia or from "Aram", an ancient name for Syria. Various dialects of Aramaic coevolved with Hebrew throughout much of its history, as major languages in the region. The words in Greek and Hebrew at the time corresponding to the word "Hebrew" (Εβραις, Εβραιστι, עברית יהודית) are distinguished from Aramaic συριστι συριακη.[24]

The Persian Empire that captured Babylonia a few decades later adopted Imperial Aramaic as the official international language of the Persian Empire. The Israelite population, who had been exiled to Babylon from Jerusalem and its surrounding region of Judah, were allowed to return to Jerusalem to establish a Persian province, usually called Judea. Thus under occupation and enslavement, Aramaic became the administrative language for Judea when dealing with the rest of the Persian Empire.


One of several languages known to Jesus was a dialect of Aramaic. Those in the North of Israel, in Galilee, interacted with Aramaic-speaking societies to the North and East, including for trade. Under Roman occupation, they also spoke some Greek or Latin. In the South around Jerusalem, and in Tiberias, the Jews spoke Hebrew.




Similarly, Paul is portrayed as speaking to a crowd of Jews têi hebraïdi dialéktôi[25] lit.'in the Hebrew dialect'. A commonly proposed translation for this Greek passage is 'in the Aramaic vernacular of Palestine'.[26] Such a translation ignores, of course, the fact that Aramaic has a standard word in Greek συριστι/συριακη (cf. LXX Job 42:17ff, and Dan 2:4.), it is really only based on place names that are called Hebrew and that had an Aramaizing etymology. In a groundbreaking article Grintz suggested that Hebrew, rather than Aramaic, lay behind the composition of the Gospel of Matthew.[27] Grintz dates the demise of Hebrew as a spoken language to the end of the Roman Period. Hebrew nonetheless continued on as a literary language down through Byzantine Period from the 4th century CE.


Many Hebrew linguists postulate the survival of Hebrew as a spoken language until the Byzantine Period, but some historians do not accept this. The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls distinguishes the Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew from the various dialects of Biblical Hebrew out of which it evolved: "This book presents the specific features of DSS Hebrew, emphasizing deviations from classical BH."[28] The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church which once said, in 1958 in its first edition, that Hebrew "ceased to be a spoken language around the fourth century BCE", now says, in its 1997 (third) edition, that Hebrew "continued to be used as a spoken and written language in the New Testament period".[29] An Introductory Grammar of Rabbinic Hebrew says, "It is generally believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically the Copper Scroll and also the Bar Kokhba letters, have furnished clear evidence of the popular character of MH [Mishnaic Hebrew]."[30] And so on.[3] It is widespread among Israeli scholars to treat Hebrew as a spoken language as a feature of Judea's Roman Period.





Meanwhile, over in Babylon, the Babylonian Talmud (by the 7th century) used Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, a Jewish dialect in the Eastern branch of Middle Aramaic. For centuries Jewish Babylonian remained the spoken language of Mesopotamian Jews and the Lishana Deni. In the area of Kurdistan, there is a modern Aramaic dialect descending from it that is still spoken by a few thousand Jews (and non-Jews), though it has largely given way to Arabic.


Other coexisting languages




Template:IPA notice


Hebrew vowel chart

The vowel phonemes of Modern Israeli Hebrew


phoneme pronunciation in
Modern Hebrew
approximate pronunciation
in English
othographic representation
/a/[a](as in "spa") kamats ( ָ ) patach ( ַ ) chataf patach ( ֲ )
/e/ [e̞] (as in "bet") tsere male ( ֵי ) or tsere chaser ( ֵ ) segol ( ֶ ) chataf segol ( ֱ ), sometimes shva ( ְ )
/i/ [i] (as in "ski") khirik male ( ִי ) khirik chaser ( ִ )  
/o/ [o̞] (as in "gore")kholam male ( וֹ ) or kholam chaser ( ֹ ) kamatz katan ( ָ ) chataf kamatz ( ֳ )
/u/ [u] (as in "flu" but with no diphthongization) shuruk (וּ) kubuts ( ֻ )  

In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted (khataf). However, there is no audible distinction between the three in modern Israeli Hebrew, except that tsere is often pronounced [eɪ] as in Ashkenazi Hebrew.


The Niqqud sign "Shva" represents four grammatical entities: resting (nakh / נָח), moving (na' / נָע), floating (merahef / מְרַחֵף) and "bleating" or "bellowing" ('ga'ya' / גַּעְיָּה). In earlier forms of Hebrew, these entities were phonologically and phonetically distinguishable. However, in Modern Hebrew these distinctions are not observed. For example, the (first) Shva Nach in the word קִמַּטְתְ (fem. you crumpled) is pronounced [e̞] ([kiˈmate̞t]) even though it should be mute, whereas the Shva Na in זְמַן (time), which theoretically should be pronounced, is usually mute ([zman]). Sometimes the shva is pronounced like a tsere when accented, as in the prefix "ve" meaning "and".

One-letter prefixes




* indicates that the given example is grammatically non standard


The Hebrew word for consonants is ‘itsurim (עיצורים). The following table lists the Hebrew consonants and their pronunciation in IPA transcription:

Bilabial Labiodental Alveolar Post-
Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Nasals m מ n נ
Stops p פּ b בּ t ט,ת,תּ d ד,דּ k ק,כּ g ג,גּ ʔ א,ע
Affricates ʦ צ
Fricatives f פ v ב,ו s ס,שׂ z ז ʃ שׁ ʒ x ח,כ,ך ʁ ר h ה
Trills ʀ ר
Approximants j י
Laterals l ל

The pairs /b, v/, /k, x/ and /p, f/ have historically been allophonic. In Modern Hebrew, however, all six sounds are phonemic, due to mergers involving formerly distinct sounds (/v/ merging with /w/, /k/ merging with /q/, /x/ merging with /ħ/), loss of consonant gemination (which formerly distinguished the stop members of the pairs from the fricatives when intervocalic), and the introduction of syllable-initial /f/ through foreign borrowings.

ע was once pronounced as a voiced pharyngeal fricative. Most modern Ashkenazi Jews do not differentiate between א and ע; however, Mizrahi Jews and Arabs pronounce these phonemes. Georgian Jews pronounce it as a glottalized q. Western European Sephardim and Dutch Ashkenazim traditionally pronounce it [ŋ] (like ng in sing) – a pronunciation which can also be found in the Italian tradition and, historically, in south-west Germany. (The remnants of this pronunciation are found throughout the Ashkenazi world, in the name "Yankl" and "Yanki", diminutive forms of Jacob, Heb. יעקב.)

Hebrew also has dagesh, a strengthening. There are two kinds of strengthenings: light (kal, known also as dagesh lene) and heavy (hazak or dagesh forte). There are two sub-categories of the heavy dagesh: structural heavy (hazak tavniti) and complementing heavy (hazak mashlim). The light affects the phonemes /b/ /k/ /p/ (historically, also /g/, /d/ and /t/) in the beginning of a word, or after a resting shva. Structural heavy emphases belong to certain vowel patterns (mishkalim and binyanim; see the section on grammar below), and correspond originally to doubled consonants. Complementing strengthening is added when vowel assimilation takes place. As mentioned before, the emphasis influences which of a pair of (former) allophones is pronounced. Historical evidence indicates that /g/, /d/ and /t/ also used to have allophones marked by the presence or absence of dagesh kal: these have disappeared from modern Hebrew pronunciation though the distinction in writing still appears in fully pointed texts. All consonants except gutturals and /r/ may receive the heavy emphasis (dagesh hazak).

Historical sound changes


  • BH /b/ had two allophones, [b] and [v]; the [v] allophone has merged with /w/ into SIH /v/
  • BH /k/ had two allophones, [k] and [x]; the [k] allophone has merged with /q/ into SIH /k/, while the [x] allophone has merged with /ħ/ into SIH /χ/
  • BH /t/ and /tˤ/ have merged into SIH /t/
  • BH /ʕ/ and /ʔ/ have usually merged into SIH /ʔ/, but this distinction may also be upheld in educated speech of many Sephardim and some Ashkenazim
  • BH /p/ had two allophones, [p] and [f]; the incorporation of loanwords into Modern Hebrew has probably resulted in a split, so that /p/ and /f/ are separate phonemes.


Hebrew has two frequent kinds of lexical stress, on the last syllable (milrá; מלרע) and on the penultimate syllable (the one preceding the last, mil‘él; מלעיל), of which the first is more frequent. Unofficially, some words exhibit a stress on the antepenultimate syllable or even further back; this occurs often in loanwords, e.g. פּוֹלִיטִיקָה /poˈlitika/, "politics", and sometimes in native Hebrew words, e.g. אֵיכְשֶׁהוּ /ˈeχʃehu/, "somehow"; אֵיפֹשֶׁהוּ /ˈefoʃehu/, "somewhere".

Specific rules connect the location or absence of stress in a syllable with the written representation of vowel length and whether or not the syllable ends with a vowel or a consonant (theses rules are sometimes slightly different for verbs and nouns; thus the stress in the noun דָּבָר (/daˈvar/, "thing") and the verb גָּבַר (/gaˈvar/ "to overpower") are both on the last syllable, even though this syllable is pointed with the sign for a long vowel for the noun and for a short vowel for the verb). Since spoken Israeli Hebrew does not distinguish between long and short vowels, these rules are not evident in speech. They usually cannot be inferred from written text either, since usually vowel diacritics are omitted. The result is that nowadays stress has phonemic value, as the following table illustrates: acoustically, the following word pairs differ only in the location of the stress; orthographically they differ also in the written representation of the length of the vowels, however if vowel diacritics are omitted (as is usually the case in Modern Israeli Hebrew) they are written identically:

common spelling
(Ktiv Hasar Niqqud)
mil‘él-stressed milrá-stressed
spelling with vowel diacritics pronunciation translation spelling with vowel diacritics pronunciation translation
ילדיֶלֶד/ˈjeled/boyיֵלֵד/jeˈled/will give birth
אוכלאֹכֶל/ˈoχel/foodאוֹכֵל/oˈχel/eats (masculine singular)




Writing system


Vowel signs


Consonant letters

All Hebrew consonant phonemes are represented by a single letter (with some exceptions in Modern Hebrew). Although a single letter might represent two phonemes – the letter "bet," for example, represents both /b/ and /v/ – the two sounds are always related "hard" (plosive) and "soft" (fricative) forms, their pronunciation being very often determined by context. In fully pointed texts, the hard form normally has a dot, known as a dagesh, in its center.



Mater lectionis

The letters he, vav and yod can represent consonantal sounds (/h/, /v/ and /j/, respectively) or serve as a markers for vowels. In the latter case, these letters are called "emot q'ria" ("matres lectionis" in Latin, "mothers of reading" in English).

The letter he at the end of a word usually indicates a final /a/, which usually indicates feminine gender, or /e/, which usually indicates masculine gender. In rare cases it may also indicate /o/, such as in שְׁלֹמֹה (Shlomo, Solomon). It may also indicate a possessive suffix for 3rd person feminine singular (סִפְרָהּ, her book), but in that case the he is not a mater lectionis but the consonant /h/, although in spoken Hebrew the distinction is rarely made. In texts with niqqud the he is written with a mappiq in the latter case. Correct pronunciation must be guessed according to context and niqqud may be used for disambiguation.

Vav may represent /o/ or /u/, and yod may represent /i/ or /e/. Sometimes a double yud is used for /ej/ or /aj/ (this convention is derived from Yiddish). In some modern Israeli texts, the letter alef is used to indicate long /a/ sounds in foreign names, particularly those of Arabic origin.


Indicating stress




See also


  1. Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word:A Language History of the World, Harper Perennial, London, New York, Toronto, Sydney 2006 p80
  2. Languages of the World (Hebrew)
  3. 3.0 3.1 William M. Schniedewind, "Prolegomena for the Sociolinguistics of Classical Hebrew", The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures vol. 5 article 6PDF (373 KiB)
  7. Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Resurgence of the Hebrew Language by Libby Kantorwitz
  9. Nosonovski, Michael (in Russian)
  11. "Society / Religion". 2006. Retrieved 2007-12-31. 
  12. "Jewish oblast retains identity despite emigration". Vladivostok News. 2000. Retrieved 2007-12-31. 
  13. "Jewish life revived in Russia". Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS. 2006. Retrieved 2007-12-31. 
  17. Zuckermann, Mosaic or mosaic? – The Genesis of the Israeli Language
  21. Ibid., p. 63.
  22. ibid.
  23. [1]
  25. Acts 21:40; 22:2; 26:14
  31. Postalveolar sounds (with the exception of /ʃ/) are not native to Hebrew, and only found in borrowings.


External links

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