Hebrew

The ancient Hebrew language is enshrined in the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament. Modern Hebrew is a member of the Semitic language family and is spoken by approximately 13 million people worldwide, with most speakers living in Israel, where it is one of the two official languages of the country (the other being Arabic). One of the world's oldest living languages, it is the only surviving member of the Canaanite language subfamily that emerged in the second millennium BCE. It is often referred to as Leshon (also spelled Lashon) HaKodesh, or “The Holy Language,” as the Bible and other religious texts are written in its classical or biblical form.

Hebrew is believed to have developed as an independent language in the 12th century BCE, when it branched off Phoenician, another Canaanite language. The earliest written evidence of Hebrew as a distinctive language comes from the Gezer calendar, which dates back to the 10th century BCE, around the time of David and Solomon's rule over the kingdom of Israel. From this time until the sixth century BCE and the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people from Israel, Hebrew flourished as both a written and a spoken language. While in exile, the Jews living in Babylonia and the few Jews who remained in Israel began to use Aramaic, another Semitic language, as their spoken language. Despite this, however, Hebrew remained as the language of prayer and writing for the Jewish people. It was not until the beginning of the Zionist movement at the end of the 19th century and the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda that Hebrew was revived as a spoken language among the Jewish people.

Hebrew is written from right to left. Its modern alphabet, or alefbet as it is called in Hebrew, was developed in the third century BCE from the Aramaic script and contains 22 letters, 5 of which change form if found at the end of a word. It is, along with the sparsely spoken Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic, the only language that uses this alphabet today. As with most other ancient Semitic languages, the alphabet does not contain any vowels. In the eighth century CE, when Hebrew was already in decline as a spoken language, a system of vowels, called niqqud, was developed to make it easier to read and write in Hebrew. Niqqud comprises dots and dashes written above or below the Hebrew letters and is not normally needed by speakers to read and write the language, but it does aid nonnative speakers and children in learning the language and can usually be found in prayer books and scripture.

Modern Hebrew is regulated by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which is largely concerned with coining Hebrew words for loanwords, mostly in the areas of science and technology. Since Hebrew is spoken almost exclusively in the state of Israel, which is geographically a rather small country, there are considered to be only two dialects in the language, Standard Hebrew and Oriental Hebrew. The two varieties are not regional dialects but rather a result of the different countries of origin of Israelis today, and they differ primarily in pronunciation. Oriental Hebrew is spoken by Israelis who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries, while Standard Hebrew, a more Europeanized version, is spoken by the Ashkenazi community. Increasingly, however, these differences in pronunciation are diminishing, and Standard Hebrew is becoming the dominant style spoken.

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