Hebrew in the home

In order to get Hebrew to be spoken by the people in their daily life, some people had to start. Ben Yehuda and his wife agreed to make their house Hebrew only [1, p37], as an example and a test. In attempting to use Hebrew for daily tasks, they continually had to deal with the problem of things that did not exist at the time of the Torah and so which there were no Hebrew words for. They would coin new words from old roots as they went along, and slowly built up a vocabulary for daily use.

Even with this expanding vocabulary, it was a lot of work for them both. Ben Yehuda had worked with Hebrew most of his life, but he was not yet fluent in spoken Hebrew. His wife had to work even harder, as she had started learning to speak Hebrew just on the boat to Palestine. [1, p38]

Actually having native speakers of Hebrew was essential to its revival, and Ben Yehuda realized this. He convinced his wife that they should raise their newborn son to be a monolingual Hebrew speaker. Their son, Ben Avi, heard only Hebrew for the first seven years of his life. Almost all this Hebrew was spoken by his parents, with the occasional vistor. Probably as a result of this limited input, Ben Avi did not begin to speak until age four. [1, p39] This late onset was very worrying for his parents, especially his mother, as well as the people that looked to their household as an example. Until Ben Avi started to speak, no other family was willing to take the risk that their child might end up languageless.

Even after Ben Yehuda and his wife had shown that a Hebrew speaking household was practical, very few families decided to try. Switching to Hebrew was a lot of work, and few people felt as strongly enough about the revival to put in the huge effort. Additionally, not that many people yet had Hebrew good enough to use exclusively, and so there were not that many candidates. This part of the revival process, then, was not that useful until other parts of the process got people able to speak Hebrew well enough.