Culture & society
Bringing languages back from the dead
12 min
Hebrew went from a liturgical language to a living national tongue; Welsh and Maori clawed back from decline. Explore how endangered languages are revived, why it's so hard, and why communities fight to save them.
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Show notes
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda repurposed ancient religious terms like fiery creatures to create modern words for electricity.
The first native speaker of modern Hebrew proved a liturgical relic could become a primary language.
New Zealand's language nest model uses intergenerational immersion to teach Maori to children before age six.
The nineteen eighty-seven Maori Language Act granted official status to a tongue once suppressed by colonial law.
Linguistic health depends on intergenerational transmission within the home rather than just classroom instruction.
Indigenous languages act as unique operating systems containing ecological data unknown to Western science.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Hebrew Miracle: From Liturgy to Life3 min
- 3The Maori Language Nest Model3 min
- 4The Mechanics of Revitalization3 min
- 5Why the Fight Matters2 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- The Māori saved their language from extinction. Here’s how. | National Geographic
- Hebrew wasn't spoken for 2000 years. Here's how it was revived.
- Language revitalization - Wikipedia
- Revival of the Hebrew language
- Endangered Languages: Revival and Revitalization
- How to Resurrect Dying Languages | Discover Magazine
- Professor Ghil'ad Zuckermann, D.Phil. (Oxford), Language Revival and Multiple Causation, Oxford University Press
- The man bringing dead languages back to life - BBC
- When Languages Come Back to Life: Comparing Hebrew and Māori – Lyceum of History
- Why certain languages are vanishing in two generations while others nearly dead are reviving - Eikleaf
- Māori language revival
- Language dreams: an ancient tongue awakens in a Jewish baby | Aeon Ideas
- Corpus planning and codification in the Hebrew Revival | John Benjamins
- The Emergence of Spoken Israeli Hebrew Shlomo Izre'el Hebrew was spoken in Palestine during biblical and Mishnaic times. At the beginning of the twentieth century Hebrew was reintroduced into speech, and has become a full-fledged vernacular and the national language of the Jews in Israel. As an official language of Israel, and as the language of the majority, Hebrew is used also by minorities in the State of Israel as their second language. The shift in status of Hebrew to a full-fledged native language is most commonly referred to as the "revival" of Hebrew. Pre-twentieth century Hebrew, however, while not used as an everyday all-purpose vernacular, must not be regarded a dead language. "Its most unusual feature was not that it was 'dead' (a much abused term) and had to be 'artificially revived', but that it was no one's mother tongue, and that there were no speakers of any dialects closely related to it" (Blanc 1968: 237). Although there were no native speakers of Hebrew during the many centuries of Jewish existence in the Diaspora, Hebrew was used as the language of liturgy and religious studies. It also served for writing secular literature, notably during the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Hebrew was used as the Jewish lingua franca, both in the Diaspora and in Palestine. Eretz Israel, "The Land of Israel," always attracted Jews. Jews from all over the world visited Palestine, sometimes settling there, especially since the late eighteenth century (Eliav 1978: 75-109, 1981: x-xi). Thus, Jews of various communities and from different linguistic backgrounds came into contact in Palestine, necessitating a common language. This lingua franca could only be Hebrew, the common language shared by Jews throughout the world. The Hebrew lingua franca of nineteenth century Palestine was used for trade and other purposes (Roth 1934; Ish-Shalom 1944; Chomsky 1950; Parfitt 1972, 1984; Rabin 1975, 1979). Driven by the understanding that the change in status of Hebrew was not a revival per se, other terms were suggested for the process of nativization and vernacularization of Hebrew. "(Re)vernacularization" would probably be the best term for this sociolinguistic change (cf. Spolsky 1995: 199, although Spolsky himself adopts the term "revitalization"). For this discussion, however, focusing on the linguistic aspects of the formation of the spoken medium, the term "emergence" is preferable; it suggests the formation of a new linguistic entity. The spread of the nationalistic movements in Europe in the nineteenth-century spurred the idea of the national revival of the Jewish people in Palestine. There was a call for the revival of the Hebrew language as a prerequisite for this Jewish national revival. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, later known as "the father of the Hebrew language revival", vigorously raised this call. Ben-Yehuda, who immigrated to Palestine in 1881, was a leading figure in the activities surrounding the so-called "revival" of Hebrew. He fought fanatically for its spread as a spoken language, even so far as to make his eldest son (born in 1882) speak Hebrew as his first language. Yet it was not until the first decade of the twentieth century, after the arrival of another wave of immigration (the so-called "Second Aliya"), that the rapid spread of spoken Hebrew and the nativization of Hebrew took place (Bar-Adon 1975: 19; cf. Haramati 1979: chaps. 2-4). The popular status of Ben-Yehuda as the only reviver of the Hebrew language is, therefore, a myth. Agnon, the Nobel-Prize laureate in literature, summed up this attitude to Ben-Yehuda and the "revival" of the language in the following way: "the people look for a hero, and we give them one" (Bar-Adon 1977: 96, my translation). The mythology about Eliezer Ben-Yehuda has persisted to such an extent that even some recent wor, such as Claude Hagège (2000: chapter 10) still bases the "resurrection" of the Hebrew language on Ben Yehuda's role. Hagège does so in spite of his understanding that "la résurrection de l'hébreu israélien n'a pas été une ɶvre véritablement planifiée," and that even the evolvement of the lexicon of the emerging language, where Ben Yehuda had indeed played a major role, was a collective endeavor (p. 317). The conditions for the so-called "revival" of the Hebrew language were most favorable. The Haskala (Enlightenment) movement of nineteenth-century Europe had already taken the initial step towards the modernization of Hebrew in its written form (Patterson 1962; Kutscher 1982: §§306-8). The new idealistic immigrants were then impelled to make Hebrew their language not only as a means of intercommunal communication, but also as a matter of principle (Simon 1920: 132). The adoption of Hebrew as the intercommunal language was eased by the fact that Palestine at that age did not have a national language (Ornan 1984: 243-245). By 1916-18 more than 75% of the young population in the new settlements in Palestine used Hebrew as their sole or primary language, and the number of native speakers of Hebrew steadily grew (Bachi 1955: 179-189; for Jaffa and Tel Aviv, see Smilansky 1930). The sociolinguistic data on the emergence of Hebrew as a spoken language may indicate the spread and nativization of the Hebrew language through education, suggesting that the acquisition of the language occurred first with the children and subsequently with their parents (Haramati 1979, 1981; Walk 1981). Yet the question of how it was possible—from the linguistic point of view—to transform the Hebrew language once again into a vernacular has not yet been answered satisfactorily. This paper aims to suggest a new direction for the study of the linguistic processes that have created the Israeli Hebrew vernacular. The emergence of Hebrew as a spoken language can be compared to other cases of language genesis, notably the emergence of Creoles. Thus, the case of the vernacularization and nativization of Hebrew should not be regarded as a miracle, a view that is encountered quite often (Wexler 1990: §1.1). The emergence of Hebrew as a spoken language was not the revival of a dead language, but the creation of a new language. Even the people active in that idealistic movement of introducing Hebrew use into the new Zionist agenda realized that the emerging Hebrew vernacular was a new system, a language composed of elements drawn from various stages of older (or ancient) Hebrew, mainly biblical and mishnaic forms (cf., e.g., Zichronot 1929: 15-37; also Klausner 1925). And so it was: Modern Hebrew has been constituted of elements—words and phrases, individual forms—from all previous stages of the language (Kutscher 1968: 309; Blau 1978; already Rosén 1956: chap. 2 and others before him, as early as Rabinowicz 1924). Yet the structure of the emerging language was not and could not have been based upon a preexisting vital Hebrew structure. Gotthelf Bergsträsser, one of the leading Semitists at the beginning of this century, defined Modern Hebrew as a "europäische Sprache in durchsichtiger hebräischer Kleidung" (Bergsträsser 1928: 47; cf. also Rosén 1977: §1.5). E. M. Lipschütz, an internal observer, had made a similar observation as early as 1914: Our inner language is not Hebrew, but foreign-jargonic. This truth has to be said, although it is not pleasant. The inner form of the words is foreign, and the syntax is foreign. The foreign influence comes from remote languages, most of them Indo-European (Jüdish-Deutsch, Ladino, Judeo-Persian). The influence of the jargons is not to be lost with children and children of children, since the children will have learned the foreign syntactical features within the Hebrew of their parents (Lipschütz 1923: 36). Several years later he spoke of a younger generation for whom "the colloquial language is now rooted in an inner language." (Lipschütz 1920: 32). This "inner language" was, of course, Hebrew; but it was a new Hebrew, structured during the first decades of the emergence of the spoken language. The generators of this Hebrew were the first group to have this newly emerged language as their mother tongue. The restructuring of existing elements of a language is not a unique phenomenon. Other languages have emerged in a similar way, by rapidly building and restructuring existing materials from other languages. The process of emergence of new languages that acquire native speakers is known as "Creolization". This is the process through which Creole languages have emerged worldwide. The best-known examples include the languages of the Caribbean, among which are the English-based Jamaican Creole and the French-based Haitian Creole. The nativization of Hebrew has already been compared to the emergence of Creoles, yet with reservations. It was perhaps Bar-Adon who—with great caution—was the first to compare the nativization of Hebrew to the forging of Creoles out of pidgin languages (Bar-Adon 1965: 84, 1975: 42). He insisted, however, that "it would be utterly wrong to conclude that contemporary Hebrew is a 'mixed language' or the like. This would be a misstatement" (1965: 82). While demonstrating the emergence of Creoles from a starting point different than a pidgin, Hymes (1971: 79) mentions the creolization of Hebrew after an initial process of koinéization (after Blanc 1968; see further Siegel 1985, 1997). Bendavid, a normativist by orientation, observed that "the birth processes of the Hebrew speech in its renewal in the mouth of several types of immigrants and children of immigrants resembles ... the way in which pidgin languages were created" (Bendavid 1985: 165). Hebraists ignored the suggestions I made in the mid-1980s (cf. Izre'el 1986) for new directions of research into the emergence of spoken Hebrew in the framework of creolization; creolists regarded them as too controversial (cf. Izre'el 1986). The Hebraists' dismissal of this suggestion is understandable in view of their prescriptivist inclination, still widespread in present-day Israel. Still, the reluctance of creolists to accept this idea is surprising. Perhaps it was the result of the state of the art of Creole Studies at that time, which tended to see Creoles and creolization as a special case within the vast continuum of language contact. Any idea, which tended to categorize as Creole a linguistic variety not perfectly congruous with what a Creole seemed to be, was rejected. Indeed, when I first considered this idea, I stated—perhaps too vigorously—that Israeli Hebrew was a Creole. I have now softened this claim to suggest
- Eliezer Ben-Yehuda & the Revival of Hebrew | Jewish Virtual Library
- Revitalising te reo, 1970s and 1980s | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
- Te reo Māori – the Māori language | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
- Tama Tū, Reo Ora – Te Petihana 1972 | Kauwhata Reo
- History of the Māori language | NZ History
- Micro language planning and the revival of Hebrew: A schematic framework
- From Ulpan to Te Kohanga Reo to Ulpan — Indigenous Coalition For Israel
- Hebrew: A Dead Language Revived - Unpacked
- The Revival of the Hebrew Language
- Yehudit and modern Hebrew: why Israel brought a language back from the past - yehudit rose in israel
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