Hebrew

Also known as: Hebrew, Ivrit

Hebrew (עברית, Ivrit) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Canaanite group and the principal language of Israel, where it has official status. It was spoken in antiquity, then gradually ceased to be a community’s ordinary daily vernacular during the first centuries CE, but it continued without interruption in Jewish prayer, study, literature, and correspondence; calling it simply “dead” therefore obscures that history. From the late nineteenth century, speakers and institutions in the Yishuv expanded Hebrew for modern daily life, and it became the community’s common spoken language and later the language of the state. Modern Hebrew is written right-to-left in the Hebrew alphabet, usually without vowel points, and combines inherited Semitic root-and-pattern morphology with vocabulary and constructions drawn from many historical and contact sources.