Page from the Mishneh Torah (circa 1457), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Name used by its speakers (Endonym): Ivrit / עִבְרִית
Native speakers (estimated): 5 million
Total speakers, including second-language (estimated): 9 million
Where it’s spoken: Where it’s spoken: Hebrew (specifically, Modern Hebrew) is the official language of Israel, and in its older Classical or Biblical forms, Hebrew remains the liturgical language of Judaism worldwide and is also studied (if not necessarily spoken) by Jewish and non-Jewish scholars of religion and the ancient world. In Israel, roughly half of the population are native Hebrew speakers, but it widely understood by most of the country—with 90% of Israeli Jews and 60% of Israeli Arabs reporting proficiency in the language. After Hebrew, the next most common native languages in Israel include Russian, Arabic, and Yiddish, though English is also spoken by many as a non-native language, and a variety of other languages have been brought to Israel by its diverse communities of Jewish immigrants.
Outside of Israel, Hebrew is spoken by relatively few as a native language. It shares recognition as a minority language in Poland (with Czech, German, Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish and others) and in Turkey (with Greek, Armenian, and Bulgarian). It is mentioned in the South African constitution as a language to be protected for religious purposes (alongside Arabic and Sanskrit). However, at most only tiny minorities within each of those countries speak Hebrew on a regular basis. The other nations in which Hebrew has no official status, but there are significant numbers of speakers include the United States (over 200,000), Canada (over 80,000), Germany, Russia, Australia and the UK; these communities include both Israeli emigrants and Jews using Hebrew as a religious language. Hebrew is understood or spoken by many Palestinians due to proximity and economic necessity.
Sign for visitors at the Western Wall, Jerusalem
Hebrew is unique among world languages due to both its persistence over millennia of use as a “classical” language, and the remarkable fact that it was lost but then successfully revived as a living vernacular (In contrast, Greek has never gone away as an everyday language; Latin has never come back as one.) The Hebrew Bible was written in a dialect likely spoken by the Israelites around the 6th century BCE, but by the time of the Common Era, Hebrew had given way to Aramaic, its linguistic cousin—the language (likely) spoken by Jesus and his first followers.
However, Hebrew persevered across centuries as a unifying Jewish language—used in religion, literature, scholarship, and as a lingua franca between educated Jews who spoke different native tongues (similar to the function of Latin among the Christian world). Revival of Hebrew as a modern language started in the 19th century, led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, using words based on existing texts or adapted from other languages. In 1921 Hebrew became an official language of British Palestine (with English and Arabic), and in 1948 was declared the official language of the State of Israel.
Trilingual road sign (Hebrew, Arabic, and English)
In addition to its use across the Jewish diaspora, Hebrew is also studied by archaeologists and taught in many Christian seminaries. Hebrew letters appear on the seals of Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth and Brandeis Universities—and while Harvard’s seal contains only Latin, Hebrew (and Greek) were also mandatory subjects in the 17th century.
Language family: Afroasiatic family, Semitic branch. Though Hebrew speakers are relatively few, Afroasiatic is the fourth-largest language family (after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger-Congo).
Torah – Passage from the Book of Esther
Related languages include: Related languages include: Hebrew’s closest living relative is Aramaic, which is now considered to be endangered. Other Semitic languages include Arabic (by far the most widely spoken), Amharic and Tigrinya (spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea), and Maltese.
Kosher McDonald’s, Jerusalem