Comparisons with other revivals and introductions

One might think that because the revival of Hebrew was possible, so must be revivals of other languages. No other attempt has had anywhere near the success of Hebrew, though. One major feature that people overlook is that Hebrew was no longer used at all in the domain in which it was brought back. In the case of most of these other languages, they are not dead but dying. And they are dying because their speakers are turning away from them towards the language of the media and of the dominant culture and society. The forces that pull the youth away from the language are powerful, and they were not really ones Hebrew had to deal with.

In a strange way, being no longer used as a spoken language actually helped Hebrew. People were learning to speak a language that was not a low prestige language stomped upon by some dominant one, but instead a language with no status at all in spoken usage. In Palestine there also was no media or society at large to be competing with, especially for the youth out in the Kibbutzim, the farming communities set up by the socialist Russian immigrants of the second aliyah. There it was possible to get an entire community to start speaking Hebrew without external interference. Few if any modern language revivals are in this situation.

The revival of Hebrew was also helped by the massive numbers of young immigrants of the first and second alyot. They got behind the revival and were willing to work to build a Jewish language to go along with their independent Jewish nation and identity. In the case of national language revivals this drive is often much less powerful and widespread. These immigrants also were coming to a new place with the intention of radically changing their way of life, from urban to agrarian. Changing their language along with all the rest was not that much more. In the case of a population that just wants to revitalize their language, there's not the symbolic and irreversible immigration to select the truly committed and put them in a place together. Instead, some dedicated people who want to change the language are together with many people who are open to the idea but not committed and some who are stubborn, far less ideal conditions.

We come back then to the question of when it is practical to revive a language in a given domain. It looks like, from the experience of the revivers of Hebrew, that there are several factors needed:

• Some dedicated organizers: Ben Yehuda, countless others.
• An idealistic and committed population: The alyiot.
• A way in which it is more useful to have the language than not, and correspondingly the absence of a larger language that could better fill that need: the Jews of Palestine lacked a common language, and none of the languages they did speak was well suited to become one.

Most other revival cases fail one or more of these. There is also the factor that there probably needs to be a domain in which the language to be revived can become exclusive. In other cases of revival, the languages were not intended to replace the dominant one, just supplement it as a culturally helpful second language.