Modern Hebrew has 25 to 27 consonants and 5 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.
Oriental and non-Oriental accents 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 Anatolian), and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern, Iranian, and North African). Over time features of these systems of pronunciation merged, and at present scholars identify two main pronunciations of modern (i.e., not liturgical) Hebrew: Oriental and Non-Oriental. Oriental Hebrew displays traits of an Arabic substrate.Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald. "Modern Hebrew", in Khan, Geoffrey, Michael P. Streck, and Janet CE Watson (eds.). The Semitic languages: an international handbook. Edited by Stefan Weninger. Vol. 36. Walter de Gruyter, 2011. p. 524-25 Elder oriental speakers tend to use an alveolar trill , preserve the pharyngeal consonants and (less commonly) ,Zuckermann, G. (2005). "Abba, why was Professor Higgins trying to teach Eliza to speak like our cleaning lady?: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, Prescriptivism and the Real Sounds of the Israeli Language", Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 19, pp. 210-231. preserve gemination, and pronounce in some places where non-Oriental speakers do not have a vowel (the shva na). A limited number of Oriental speakers, for example elderly Yemenite Jews, even maintain some pharyngealized (emphatic) consonants also found in Arabic, such as for Biblical . Israeli Arabs ordinarily use the Oriental pronunciation, vocalising the ‘ayin () as , resh (ר) as [r] and, less frequently, the ḥet () as .
Pronunciation of ע Non-Oriental (and General Israeli) pronunciation mostly lost the emphatic and pharyngeal sounds of Biblical Hebrew under the influence of European languages (Slavic and Germanic for Ashkenazim and Romance for Sephardim). The pharyngeals and are preserved by older Oriental speakers. Dialectally, Georgian Jews pronounce as , while Western European Sephardim and Dutch Ashkenazim traditionally pronounce it , a pronunciation that can also be found in the Italian tradition and, historically, in south-west Germany. However, according to Sephardic and Ashkenazic authorities, such as the Mishnah Berurah and the Shulchan Aruch and Mishneh Torah, is the proper pronunciation. Thus, it is still pronounced as such by some Sephardim and Ashkenazim.
Notwithstanding, in some cases, the letter may still be pronounced as a weaker glottal stop or pharyngeal sound by Israeli speakers, for example to disambiguate meaning - for instance, "בעלי" (my husband) features a stop on the ע which among others may help disambiguate from "בא לי" (all right with me, both words usually pronounced jointly without stop).
Pronunciation of ר The classical pronunciation associated with the consonant rêš was a flap , and was grammatically ungeminable. In most dialects of Hebrew among the Jewish diaspora, it remained a flap or a trill . However, in some Ashkenazi dialects of northern Europe it was a uvular rhotic, either a trill or a fricative . This was because certain native dialects of Yiddish were spoken that way, and the liturgical Hebrew of these speakers carried the Yiddish pronunciation. Some Iraqi Jews also pronounce rêš as a uvular , reflecting Baghdad Jewish Arabic.
Though an Ashkenazi Jew in the Russian Empire, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda based his Standard Hebrew on Sephardi Hebrew, originally spoken in Spain, and therefore recommended an alveolar . However, just like him, the first waves of Jews to resettle in the Holy Land were Ashkenazi, and Standard Hebrew would come to be spoken with some aspects of their native pronunciation. Consequently, by now nearly all Israeli Jews pronounce the consonant rêš as a uvular fricative (), which also exists in certain forms of Yiddish.
Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin, and pronounced the Hebrew rhotic consonant as an alveolar trill, identical to Arabic , and which followed the conventions of old Hebrew.Based on Rabbi Saadia Gaon's Judeo-Arabic commentary on “Sefer Yetzirah” (chapter 4, paragraph 3), wherein he describes the phonetic sounds of the 22 characters of the Hebrew alphabet and classifies them in groups based on their individual sounds: “Aleph (), hé (), ḥet (), ‘ayin () are [guttural sounds] produced from the depth of the tongue with the opening of the throat, but bet (), waw (), mim (), pé () are [labial sounds] made by the release of the lips and the end of the tongue; whereas gimel (), yōd (), kaf (), quf () are [palatals] separated by the width of the tongue [against the palate] with the [emission of] sound. However, daleth (), ṭet (), lamed (), nūn (), tau () are [linguals] separated by the mid-section of the tongue with the [emission of] sound; whereas zayin (), samekh (), ṣadi (), resh (), shin () are [dental sounds] produced between the teeth by a tongue that is at rest.” In modern Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi poetry and folk music, as well as in the standard (or "standardised") Hebrew used in the Israeli media, an alveolar rhotic is sometimes used.
Consonants The following table lists the consonant phonemes of Israeli Hebrew in IPA transcription:
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar/uvularPharyn-geal Glottal Stop 2 Affricate *4** Fricative * 1 3 (1 2) 2 Nasal Approximant * * Phoneme was introduced through loanwords. 1 In modern Hebrew for ח has merged with (which was traditionally used only for fricative כ) into . Some older Mizrahi speakers still separate these (as explained above). is often realized as a voiceless uvular trill . 2 The glottal consonants tend to be elided, which is most common in unstressed syllables. In informal speech, elision may occur in stressed syllables as well, whereas in careful or formal speech, glottals may be retained in all positions. In modern Hebrew for ע has been absorbed by , which was traditionally used only for . Again, some speakers still separate these. 3 is usually pronounced as a uvular approximant , and sometimes as a uvular trill , alveolar trill or alveolar flap , depending on the background of the speaker. 4 While the phoneme was introduced through borrowings, it can appear in native words as a sequence of and as in .
For many young speakers, obstruents assimilate in voicing. Voiceless obstruents (stops/affricates and fricatives ) become voiced () when they appear immediately before voiced obstruents, and vice versa. For example:
> ('to close'), > > ('a right'), > > ('a bill'), > > ('a printer'), > > ('security'), >
is pronounced before velar consonants.
Illustrative words Letter Example word IPA Hebrew IPA Hebrew English mouth what baker jackal fleet end miracle passion year day all how hot Letter Example word IPA Hebrew IPA Hebrew English interview son harp fuel this no giraffe beige penguin also head with echo
Historical sound changes Standard Israeli Hebrew (SIH) phonology, based on the Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation tradition, has a number of differences from Biblical Hebrew (BH) and Mishnaic Hebrew (MH) in the form of splits and mergers.Robert Hetzron. (1987). Hebrew. In The World's Major Languages, ed. Bernard Comrie, 686–704. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . BH/MH and merged into SIH . BH/MH and merged into SIH . BH/MH and generally merge into SIH or became silent, but the distinction is maintained in the speech of older Sephardim and is reintroduced in the speech of some other speakers. BH/MH had two allophones, and , which split into separate phonemes and in SIH. BH/MH had two allophones, and . The allophone merged with into SIH . A new phoneme was introduced in loanwords (see Hebrew vav as consonant), so SIH has phonemic . BH/MH had two allophones, and . The allophone merged with into SIH , while the allophone merged with into SIH , though a distinction between and is maintained in the speech of older Sephardim. BH/MH , and merged into their plosive counterparts, , and . BH/MH de-pharyngealized and affricated to SIH . BH/MH backed to SIH ; the former pronunciation is still used by Sephardi and Mizrahi speakers.
Spirantization The consonant pairs – (archaically ), – (archaically ), and – (archaically ) were historically allophonic, as a consequence of a phenomenon of spirantization known as begadkefat under the influence of the Aramaic language on BH/MH. In Modern Hebrew, the above six sounds are phonemic.
The full inventory of Hebrew consonants which undergo and/or underwent spirantization are:
Letter Begadkefat Name Hebrew Biblical /Mishnaic Modern /Israeli Bet – – Gimel – Dalet – Kaph – – Pe – – Taw –
However, the above-mentioned allophonic alternation of BH/MH –, – and – was lost in Modern Hebrew, with these six allophones merging into simple .
These phonemic changes were partly due to the mergers noted above, to the loss of consonant gemination, which had distinguished stops from their fricative allophones in intervocalic position, and the introduction of syllable-initial and non-syllable-initial and in loan words. Spirantization still occurs in verbal and nominal derivation, but now the alternations –, –, and – are phonemic rather than allophonic.
Loss of final H consonant In Traditional Hebrew words can end with an H consonant, e.g. when the suffix "-ah" is used, meaning "her" (see Mappiq). The final H sound is hardly ever pronounced in Modern Hebrew. However, the final H with Mappiq still retains the guttural characteristic that it should take a patach and render the pronunciation /a(h)/ at the end of the word, for example, gavoa(h) ("tall").
Vowels
Modern Hebrew has a simple five-vowel system.
Front Central Back High Mid Low
Vowel length is non-contrastive and consecutive identical vowels are allowed in the case of glottal consonant elision, e.g. vs and vs .
There are two native diphthongs, and , and two loaned diphthongs and .
Phoneme Example 'man' 'red' (f) 'mother' 'light' 'father'
Vowel length In most Masoretic traditions of Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: long, short and interrupted (). However, there is no audible distinction between the three in Modern Hebrew, except that is often pronounced as in Ashkenazi Hebrew.
Shva