Hebrew

Where it’s spoken

Modern Hebrew (Ivrit) is the dominant language of Israel and is spoken by Jewish communities worldwide as a liturgical and second language. Roughly 9 million people use Modern Hebrew daily, with the largest number being native Israeli speakers. Biblical Hebrew remains a religious language for Jewish prayer and Torah study globally.

What it sounds like

Hebrew has a small vowel inventory and traditional triconsonantal root morphology — most verbs and nouns are built on three-consonant roots into which vowel patterns are inserted. Modern Hebrew has simplified some classical sounds: the emphatic and pharyngeal consonants of Biblical Hebrew are often realized as their non-emphatic equivalents in current Israeli pronunciation.

How it’s written

Hebrew is written right to left in an abjad of 22 consonant letters. Vowels are optionally indicated by niqqud marks below or above letters but are usually omitted in everyday text. Five letters take different forms when appearing at the end of a word.

History

Hebrew ceased to be a daily spoken language around 200 CE but survived in religious and scholarly use. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s late-19th-century revival project successfully turned it back into a vernacular — the only documented case of a “dead” language returning to broad mother-tongue use.