Hebrew

Also known as: Hebrew, Ivrit

Hebrew (עברית ʿivrít) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Canaanite branch (sister to extinct Phoenician, Moabite, and Edomite), with ~9M speakers — the great majority L2 — and the official language of Israel. It is the only example of a fully successful revival of a language no longer used as a daily vernacular: Biblical Hebrew flourished as the language of the Tanakh (10th-2nd c. BCE) and persisted as a liturgical / scholarly / poetic language across the Jewish diaspora for ~1,800 years after Aramaic and Greek displaced it as a vernacular, and was revived as a spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the work of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922) and the Hebrew Language Committee (1890), in parallel with the Zionist settlement movement. Written right-to-left in the Hebrew abjad (22 consonant letters; vowel marks "niqqud" optional except in poetry, religious texts, and pedagogy). Modern Hebrew has shifted from Biblical VSO to predominantly SVO; it preserves classical root-and-pattern morphology (ש-מ-ר š-m-r → shamar "guarded", shomer "guard", mishmar "watch"). Heavily influenced by Yiddish and Slavic phonology in early 20th-century Ashkenazi communities, with substantial English loanword absorption since the late 20th century.