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The Hebrew Language
Hebrew is the Official language of Israel and it is spoken by apporximately 5 million people, the majority living in Israel (4,510,000) followed by United States with about 101,686 speakers.Modern Hebrew is printed with a script known as "square". It is the same script, ultimately derived from Aramaic, that was used for copying of Bible books in Hebrew for two thousand years. This script also has a cursive version, which is used for handwriting.
History
Hebrew comes from the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic langauge family. Since in the past the majority of Hebrews lived in the Persian Empire, and the Empire adopted Aramic as the Official language, Old Hebrew borrowed words, expression and the writing system from Aramic. Due to the long Persian domination, Hebrew was no more used as a language for 2300 years. Nevertheless, in this long period of time there has always been a constant effort to keep the language alive, especially for religious purposes, as one of the oldest book written in Hebrew was the Bible. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that the real revival of Hebrew started. The leader of this revival was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a former revolutionary in Tsarist Russia who had joined the Jewish national movement and emigrated to Palestine in 1881. Ben-Yehuda based his reform of the language on biblical Hebrew, adapting it to modern times. This implied the borrowing of foreign words (brought by the numerous European Hebrew speakers), changes in grammar and the adoption of standard Western punctuation.Modern Hebrew shows influences from Russian (for example, the Russian suffix -acia is used in nouns where English has the suffix -ation); German (particularly in combination words like "tapuakh-adama," meaning potato (German Erdapfel). English has been a very strong influence, both from British influence during the period of the Mandate and American influence in the present day. Finally, Arabic, being the language of numerous Mizrahic and Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Arab countries as well as of the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, has also had an important influence on Hebrew, especially in slang (for example, "sababa", meaning "excellent", or "y'alla", meaning "come on.")