Languages
Native
Hebrew (Modern)
85%
Arabic
18%
Secondary languages
English
55%
Russian
20%
Language Samples
שלום, מה שלומך?
Shalom, ma shlomkha?
Hello, how are you?
אני בסדר, תודה רבה.
Ani beseder, toda raba.
I am fine, thank you very much.
אחד, שתיים, שלוש, ארבע, חמש, שש, שבע, שמונה, תשע, עשר.
Ekhad, shtayim, shalosh, arba, khamesh, shesh, sheva, shmone, tesha, eser.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Linguistic History
Hebrew is one of the world's most remarkable linguistic stories: a language that ceased to be spoken natively for nearly 1,700 years and was revived as a living vernacular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Biblical Hebrew, used in the Torah and ancient Israelite society, gave way to Aramaic as the daily tongue after the Babylonian exile. Hebrew survived as a language of liturgy, scholarship, and correspondence. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda spearheaded its revival, coining thousands of new words for the modern world. Modern Israeli Hebrew blends Biblical roots with Aramaic, Arabic, Yiddish, and European borrowings.
Similar Languages
Arabic
58%
Aramaic
65%
Amharic
22%
Tigrinya
19%
Media
Jerusalem's Old City — a sacred centre for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the historical heartland of the Hebrew language
Photo: Edmund Gall · CC BY-SA 2.0
Did You Know
01
Modern Hebrew is the only successful large-scale language revival in history — brought back from a liturgical language to a fully spoken vernacular with millions of native speakers.
02
The word 'Shalom' (שלום) — meaning peace, hello, and goodbye — shares its root with the Arabic word 'Salaam', reflecting the common Semitic ancestry of both languages.
03
Hebrew reads right-to-left and shares its consonantal alphabet structure with Arabic and other Semitic scripts, all descending from the Phoenician alphabet.