Hebrew

Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of the Northwest Semitic subdivision of the Semitic subfamily of the Hamito-Semitic family of languages. Hebrew was the language of the Jewish people in Biblical times. Hebrew began to die out as a spoken tongue among the Jews after they were defeated by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. It had been replaced by Aramaic as the Jewish vernacular, although it was preserved as the language of the Jewish religion and literature.

At the end of the 19th century the Zionist movement brought about the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, which culminated in its designation as an official tongue of the state of Israel in 1948. There it is spoken by most of the 4.5 million Jews of that country.