Introduction

Looking at Hebrew in Israel today, it is hard to believe that in a century Hebrew has gone from being a dead language with no native speakers to an active living language with over 5 million. It was this surprising and unique growth that interested me in Hebrew and its revival. I wanted to look at this success and see what aspects of this revival effort could be applied to other efforts.

Like every other person who has written about revival of Hebrew, I will begin by clarifying my use of the term dead. The state of the Hebrew language prior to the revival I will deal with below, but the important thing is that Hebrew was spoken and used by tens of thousands of people. Even many dying languages cannot claim anything like that. Some people use dead to mean ``gone out of use in all forms of communication'', [1, p11] and it is common to believe that a dead language is one not spoken by anyone. When I use the term dead here, then, I want to be clear that I mean it in the weaker sense of ``a language with no native speakers''.

It is also important to treat carefully the role of Ben Yehuda in the revival. He is often called ``the father of Modern Hebrew'', but it was not something he organized. He provided a force to start things moving and was active in many central and important projects, but the revival effort itself was very decentralized. It is often easier to think of a movement if we can put a face on it and call one man the leader, but here if not in most places that is not the case. This is important for prospective language revivers to realize, as many hear about Ben Yehuda and think ``if he (alone) can revive a language, so can I''. I discuss further on in what cases it is practical to try to revive a language, but it was not the work of one person. He acted as a catalyst and kept things moving, but ultimately it was the individual speakers who revived the language and they did it mostly without the control or guidance of any leader.

One final thing that I want to make clear from the start is that what is spoken now in Israel is Modern Hebrew, a new language, distinct from that of the Torah and all the varieties of Hebrew that went before. This is another thing that people who want to revive a language need to realize; that the language people end up speaking has very little chance of being the same as the one to be revived. This is probably acceptable if the goal is to get people speaking the same distinct language. On the other hand, if the intent is instead to preserve and expand a possibly sacred language of the ancestors, a successful revival would likely result in a different enough language being spoken that those who had wished to revive it would not be pleased with the result.