Modern Hebrew phonology

Modern Hebrew is phonetically simpler than Biblical Hebrew and has fewer phonemes, but it is phonologically more complex. It has 25 to 27 consonants and 8 to 10 vowels, depending on the speaker and the analysis.

Hebrew has been used primarily for liturgical, literary, and scholarly purposes for most of the past two millennia. As a consequence, its pronunciation was strongly influenced by the vernacular of individual Jewish communities. With the revival of Hebrew as a native language, and especially with the establishment of Israel, the pronunciation of the modern language rapidly coalesced.

The two main accents of modern Hebrew are Oriental and Non-Oriental. Oriental Hebrew was chosen as the preferred accent for Israel by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, but has since declined in popularity. The description in this article follows the language as it is pronounced by native Israeli speakers of the younger generations.

According to the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in the 1880s (the time of the beginning of the Zionist movement and the Hebrew revival) there were three groups of Hebrew regional accents: Ashkenazi (Eastern European), Sephardi (Southern European), and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern, Iranian, and North African). Over time features of these systems of pronunciation merged, and nowadays we find two main pronunciations of colloquial – not liturgical – Hebrew: Oriental and Non-Oriental. Oriental Hebrew displays traits of an Arabic substrate. Oriental speakers tend to use an alveolar trill [r] rather than a uvular trill [ʀ] or a velar fricative [ɣ], preserve the pharyngeal consonants /ħ/ and (less commonly) /ʕ/, preserve gemination, and pronounce /e/ in some places where non-Oriental speakers do not have a vowel (the shva na). Some Oriental speakers maintain a few of the emphatic consonants also found in Arabic, such as /sˤ/ for Biblical /tsʼ/.

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