Hebrew

Modern Hebrew (endonym: עִבְרִית חֲדָשָׁה, romanized: 'Ivrit ḥadasha, IPA: [ivˈʁit χadaˈʃa] or [ʕivˈrit ħadaˈʃa]), also known as Israeli Hebrew or simply Hebrew, is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. It is the only extant Canaanite language of the Semitic language family, as well as one of the oldest attested languages to be spoken as a first language in the modern day, on account of Hebrew being attested since the 2nd millennium BC. It uses the Hebrew Alphabet, an abjad script written from right-to-left. The current standard was codified as part of the revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now serves as the official and national language of the State of Israel, where it is predominantly spoken by its over 10 million people. Thus, Modern Hebrew is nearly universally regarded as the most successful instance of language revitalization in history.

A Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew was spoken since antiquity as the vernacular of the Israelites until around the 3rd century BCE, when it was supplanted in the Levant by a western dialect of the Aramaic language and elsewhere by the local or dominant languages of the regions Jews migrated to, and later by Judeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Spanish, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages. Although Hebrew continued to be used for Jewish liturgy, poetry and literature, and written correspondence, it became extinct as a natively spoken language.

By the late 19th century, Russian-Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had begun a popular movement to revive Hebrew as an everyday language, motivated by his desire to preserve Hebrew literature and establish a distinct Jewish nationality and nationalism in the context of Zionism. Soon after, a large number of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish speakers were murdered in the Holocaust or fled to Israel, and many speakers of Judeo-Arabic emigrated to Israel in the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, where many would adapt to Modern Hebrew.

From Wikipedia · Modern Hebrew · CC BY-SA 4.0