Hebrew language

Hebrew (Hebrew: עִבְרִית, Ivrit) is a Semitic language, a member of the Canaanite group of languages which is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Hebrew is spoken as a native language by 5.5 million people in Israel and by around 1 million abroad. The language is also spoken as a second language by around 10 million people around the world, with large Hebrew speaking communities in the United States, France, England and Argentina.

Hebrew was the language of the Ancient Hebrews, and one Hebrew dialect, common at the time the Babylonian Empire conquered Jerusalem and exiled some of the population of Judea to Babylon (586 BC), was the one with which the bulk of the Bible was written. Hebrew was gradually displaced as the daily spoken language of the Jews in favour of the Aramaic language, but retained a status as a written language, especially with regards to the reading and interpretation of the Bible, religious, secular and literary writing.

At the middle of the 19th century, after more than two millennia of serving mainly literary and scholarly purposes, Hebrew was revived in the writing of the Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) scholars. Most of those scholars spoke Yiddish, Ladino and other current languages, but tried to extend the use of Hebrew in writing to wider areas. More extensive use of the language as a spoken language emerged at the end of the 19th century in Palestine, especially with the rise in Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda is credited as the first to make a thorough attempt to recreate Hebrew as a modern spoken language, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. His efforts, and the efforts of others, were aided by the practical consideration of having an agreed upon common language for all Jewish immigrants to Israel.