The Academy of the Hebrew Language was established by a 1953 act of Knesset – the Law of the Supreme Institution for the Hebrew Language. As the arbiter of standard Hebrew, the Academy determines official Hebrew terminology, sometimes coining new words in the process, 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, to deepen and enrich people’s knowledge of Hebrew and their affection and regard for the language. Out of the public eye we conduct linguistic research, much of it in the context of our flagship enterprise, the Historical Dictionary Project – a monumental undertaking to preserve the Hebrew language and trace its development through the course of millennia 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 operated for about 50 years until the Knesset established the Academy in 1953 to succeed the Committee and continue its work.
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