‘The language that follows speech will not be the same as the one that preceded it’: spoken Hebrew in the pre-state period

Abstract

The transformation of Hebrew from a liturgical and literary language into a modern national language has aroused great interest among scholars, yet the nature of spoken Hebrew among its first generations of speakers has not yet been explored. The article presents a linguistic analysis of spoken Hebrew in pre-state Palestine. Following a methodological discussion of the available source materials and their possible contribution to the reconstruction of Hebrew speech during this formative phase, structural features of the period’s spoken language are analysed in the various linguistic domains (phonology, morphology and syntax). Focusing on features extant in contemporary spoken usage, the analysis highlights the extent of continuity in the development of spoken Hebrew and traces the roots of many contemporary phenomena in pre-state Hebrew speech.