Hebrew, a member of the family of Semitic languages, was spoken in the Land of Israel for centuries in antiquity and subsequently preserved by Jews throughout the Diaspora as a medium of cultural and religious expression. With the rise of Zionism, Jews revived Hebrew as a spoken tongue and reestablished it as the lingua franca of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel.
Modern Hebrew draws on all the previous historical layers of the language and has adapted to the times, embracing many new terms and constructions – both by imbuing ancient words with new meanings and by forging new words in classical patterns and paradigms. Modern Hebrew has also absorbed modern words from other languages, just as other contemporary languages have.
The hallmark of Semitic languages is the consonant–vowel relationship in words: consonantal roots convey primary semantic distinctions, while vowels act as modifiers, relaying grammatical information and finer semantic differences; a word contains a root combined with a vowel pattern. Semitic roots generally consist of three consonants (sometimes four, rarely five); some roots of early origin are biconsonantal.
Proto-Semitic, the hypothesized shared linguistic ancestor of Hebrew and of other Semitic languages, boasted 29 consonantal phonemes; Biblical Hebrew distinguishes just 23, represented graphically by the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet (one letter, ש, does double duty). Hebrew contains two groups of consonantal phonemes not found in modern Indo-European languages: the gutturals (pharyngeals and laryngeals, designated by the letters א, ה, ח, ע) and the emphatics (represented graphically by ט, צ, ק).
While all Hebrew letters designate consonants, some letters may also indicate vowels; but they provide only a very partial guide to vocalization. The standard system for marking vowel qualities and various other pronunciation details, such as consonant doubling, is the system of diacritical pointing (nikkud) developed by the Masoretes of Tiberias during the second half of the first millennium. Their pointing, which gained canonical status in the Jewish Bible, reflects one of multiple Jewish reading traditions; others are reflected in the Babylonian and Palestinian pointing systems (which arose around the same time and survive in manuscripts) and in the received pronunciation of sacred texts in many communities to this day. None of the pointing systems necessarily matches the pronunciation of Biblical times, because all of them were inaugurated hundreds of years after Biblical Hebrew was last spoken as a living language. Mainstream Israeli Hebrew pronunciation mixes elements of different reading traditions and does not align fully with any one tradition.
Hebrew distinguishes two genders, masculine and feminine. The masculine is unmarked; the feminine is usually marked, generally by means of the suffix -t. Oddly, the opposite is true in the names of the numerals: the feminine numerals are unmarked, while the masculine numerals bear the feminine suffix. Feminine adjectives are always marked with the feminine suffix.
Hebrew distinguishes three numbers – singular, plural, and dual. The use of dual is limited mostly to designating paired body parts, units of time (e.g., two years), or numbers (e.g., 200, 2000); it is marked by means of the suffix -ayim. Adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify; when modifying a plural or dual noun, they are marked with the suffix -im (for masculine) or -ot (for feminine). Plural nouns, too, are marked by means of the suffixes -im and -ot, but not always along the gender division that applies in adjectives: numerous masculine nouns use the suffix -ot for their plural form, and some feminine nouns use the plural suffix -im.