Learning from Hebrew

By Simon Griver

Hebrew was the language of the Old Testament, spoken by the biblical Israelites during the First Temple Period around 3,000 years ago. Following the expulsion of the Jews from their ancestral homeland by the Romans a millennium later, Diaspora Jewry either took on the language of the country in which they lived, or created a range of special Jewish dialects which mixed Hebrew with other languages, such as Yiddish (Judeo-German) and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish).

However, the Jewish people never forgot Hebrew, and it remained the language of worship and literature, expressing the desire to return to the Land of Israel. When Jews started returning to their ancestral homeland more than a century ago, one immigrant from Lithuania, Eliezer Bcn Yehuda, dedicated himself to adapting the biblical language for modem everyday use. And from Wales to Azerbaijan, Catalonia to New Zealand, many of the world's smaller nations have taken heart from Israel's experience in resuscitating a language that had not been in daily use for many hundreds of years.

"Welsh is the language most influenced by the Hebrew experience," explains Amnon Schapiro, a researcher at the Academy of the Hebrew Language. "In the 1960s, a national network of Welsh language classes was set up based on the Hebrew model." Indeed the Welsh even refer to a Welsh class as an "ulpan", the name given to classes that are especially designed for new immigrants to learn modern Hebrew (Ivrit). "Of course the Welsh are confronted by a different problem," continues Schapiro. "There the number of native Welsh speakers was eroded by the influence of English. With the help of ulpanim, the trend has been reversed." There has been a similar revival in Spain, where the Catalonian and Basque languages have made great inroads since the death of Franco, who suppressed these languages. In the 1980s, a delegation of Catalonians visited Israel to learn about the methods used in the ulpanim.

In Israel, the u1pan is essential too. New immigrants undertake a basic five-month courses, with options for subsequent advanced studies. The Jewish Agency, the body responsible for immigration, also runs a network of ulpanim around the world for those who plan to immigrate and want a head start in learning the language. In the 1990s, Jewish Agency officials who were in the former Soviet Union to teach Hebrew to potential Jewish immigrants, helped advise the newly independent peoples of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Georgia on reviving their national languages. "There the problem was not so much teaching the spoken language - many millions of people were already fluent - but rather reviving the written language," observes Schapiro. "For example in Azerbaijan, people who only read the Russian Cyrillic alphabet had to learn the Latin alphabet."

Learning Hebrew is often a more complex process than learning other languages, because it has its own alphabet, and is written from right to left. Even the most adept of adult newcomers never fully shake off their accent or awkward syntax, but children seem to take to the new language like ducks to water, often becoming fluent within months.

Researchers believe that the success of the revival of Hebrew is due to the fact that Israeli society is made up of immigrants from over 100 different countries, making Ivrit the only language that everyone has in common.

Immigrants therefore have no alternative but to learn and speak Ivrit if they wish to communicate with their neighbors. Elsewhere in the world people often already have a common language, and that makes reviving their ancestral tongue much more difficult. Ultimately, however, stubborn determination is required in order to revive a language. Early Jewish settlers in Israel would speak to each other only in Ivrit, but would set aside an hour each day to speak in Russian or Yiddish so that decisions could be taken. Ben Yehuda himself insisted on speaking to both his mother and his wife in Hebrew, even though neither understood one word he was saying.