The Academy of the Hebrew Language, the arbiter of standard Hebrew, coins new words and decides matters of grammar, orthography, punctuation, and transliteration; the Academy’s linguistic decisions appear in the official gazette of the State of Israel and are binding on all governmental bodies and educational institutions. We also engage with the public directly, both in person and online, deepening people’s knowledge of Hebrew and love for the language. Out of the public eye, we continue the important work on our flagship enterprise, the Historical Dictionary Project, a monumental undertaking to preserve the Hebrew language and trace its development since antiquity in a comprehensive historical dictionary.
Scholar and journalist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, considered the father of modern Hebrew, deservedly gets much credit for the miracle of Hebrew’s rebirth as a spoken language. Indeed, his tremendous work from the 1880s onward was instrumental to the language’s dissemination and adoption in the Yishuv (literally, ‘settlement’), the Jewish community in the Land of Israel. Nevertheless, he would not have achieved such success without the cooperation and contribution of other Hebrew grammarians and scholars, as well as schoolteachers, who together pushed to create a central body, Va'ad HaLashon (the Language Committee), to guide this ambitious undertaking. The Committee coalesced in stages from 1889 and become a more formal body in 1905. In 1953 an act of Knesset established the Academy of the Hebrew Language as a state institution to succeed the Committee and continue its work.
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