Languages ​​in Israel

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Sign in four languages ​​for a ministry in Haifa
Hebrew, English and Russian lettering on entry

The languages ​​in the State of Israel include over 33 languages ​​from several language families. Modern Hebrew has been the sole official language of Israel since the nation-state law was passed on July 19, 2018 . In fact, the former official language, Arabic , whose status was curtailed by the 2018 regulation, continues to play a prominent role, especially in relation to the Arab residential areas and for Arab Israelis (around 20%).

General

The Israeli population is a culturally diverse society in which a range of languages ​​are spoken. According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, there are 33 languages ​​and dialects in Israel. The most commonly used languages ​​are the official language Hebrew as well as Arabic, Russian , French and English . Hebrew is the common means of communication between all language communities, administrative language, court language and language of instruction in most schools. In Arab residential areas, this role is largely played by Arabic. English is the language of immigrants from Anglo-Saxon countries and also serves as a means of communication when dealing with foreigners, in public matters with regard to foreign countries and foreign institutions and visitors. The other languages ​​mainly serve the members of the language community concerned in informal communication with one another. This also applies to the world language French, which is represented in Israel by a large number of native speakers, but hardly takes on the role of an intercultural communication medium within the country. Most minority languages ​​are not a subject in school and are restricted to the informal and private sphere. Hebrew (as a first language in Jewish schools or the first foreign language in Arabic schools), Arabic (as a first language in Arabic schools or a second foreign language after English in Jewish schools), English (as a first or second foreign language) and French ( as a second foreign language). The language of instruction at the universities is Hebrew; There are also summer and winter schools for foreign students, mainly in English, Spanish and French.

According to a study conducted by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics from 2011 spoke of the over 20-year-old Israelis 49% Hebrew, 18% Arabic and 15% of Russian as a native language , but only 2% of Yiddish , 2% English and 1.6% Spanish .

Hebrew

In 1922, at the initiative of high-ranking Zionist representatives , Hebrew became one of the three official languages ​​of the British League of Nations Mandate for Palestine . This was a great success for those in the Zionist movement who wanted to restore Hebrew to the colloquial language of the Jewish people and to reduce the use of the languages ​​of the Diaspora , including Yiddish in particular . Hebrew was the historical language of all Judaism, while Yiddish, Polish, or German could only be considered the languages ​​of Central and Eastern European Judaism.

The revival of the Hebrew language in Israel goes back to Eliezer Ben-Jehuda . In 1881 he immigrated to Palestine from the Russian Empire, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire , and founded several Hebrew schools with like-minded people in the 1880s, published Hebrew newspapers and also made great efforts to revive Hebrew as a spoken language. As early as 1905, still under Ottoman rule, Hebrew was recognized as the language of the Jewish community in Palestine. In addition, the Jews of the old Yishuv , i.e. those who had already lived in the country before the waves of Zionist immigration , mostly spoke Arabic and Djudeo-Espanyol .

When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, Hebrew and Arabic became the official languages ​​of the new state. Most of the immigrants learned Hebrew, and many of them took on Hebrew names.

Today, Hebrew is the most important language in the country and is present at almost all levels of public life. Hebrew is a compulsory subject from third grade through Arabic-language schools in Israel, and Hebrew entrance exams are required for students entering Israeli schools and universities.

Arabic

With the passing of the National State Law on July 18, 2018, the Arabic language lost its status as an official language and now has the status of a special language . In their Levantine dialects, as well as in their High Arabic script, it is mainly used by the Israeli Arabs and Druze . Also Oriental Jews who immigrated from Arab countries to Israel or whose parents usually have knowledge of Arabic and use the language in everyday life. The number of Arabic speakers in the Israeli heartland (excluding the Occupied Territories) ranges from 2 to 2.5 million.

In the street and on public buildings there are bilingual signs (Hebrew and Arabic), and commercial products are often labeled in both languages; Government announcements are translated into Arabic. Arabic is a compulsory elective in Jewish schools . Hebrew is, however, the most widely used language in public life, especially outside the residential areas of Arabic. It is the dominant language not only within Jewish society in the State of Israel, but also in dealings between Arabic and Hebrew speakers. Knowledge of Hebrew is far more widespread among the Arab population than knowledge of Arabic among the Jewish.

Other

The minority languages ​​other than Arabic and English are rapidly disappearing; their number of speakers only increases in periods when, as in the case of Russian, French or Amharic (see below), larger groups of immigrants come to Israel from the respective countries. As a rule, the pressure to assimilate means that immigrants use the national language Hebrew gradually, more often and in more and more areas of everyday life, and neglect or give up their original language; Knowledge of the grandparents' native language is rare (except in the case of Arabic), so that one cannot speak of stable language communities with permanently separate identities. Hardly any of the languages ​​listed below is a regular school subject in Israel, so that we can only assume that the speakers who grew up in Israel have little knowledge of the written language. In addition to Arabic, English and French in particular are exceptions.

  • With around 1.23 million speakers, Russian is the third largest language in Israel after Hebrew and Arabic. Russian is spoken mainly by immigrants from areas of the former Soviet Union, especially from Russia and Ukraine.
  • French is spoken by around a million Israelis. Most are French Jews or Jews from the former French colonies of Morocco , Algeria, and Tunisia . The latter immigrated mainly after the establishment of the State of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s; however, immigration from France itself has only increased in recent years. In the secondary Jewish schools, French is offered as a second foreign language to be learned after English, alongside Arabic. Many immigrants from the Mediterranean and the Orient used it as an educational language in their countries of origin (Turkey, Egypt , etc.), which was spoken in addition to their mother tongue (Djudeo-Espanyol, Arabic, etc.) and the national and administrative language of the country.
  • Yiddish is spoken by a minority of Ashkenazi Jews in Israel, including many ultra-Orthodox . As an originally Jewish language, it plays a special role in Ashkenazi culture. In 1986 over 250,000 Israelis (about 6% of the then total population) spoke Yiddish. Nevertheless, Yiddish was not granted any official status in the language policy of the Zionist executive during the British mandate and later in the State of Israel; it was deliberately not elevated to a school subject, as it was initially the greatest competitor of the new national language Hebrew and, in contrast to this mother tongue, hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Today, stimulating impulses come primarily from the Yiddish-speaking communities in North America; this distinguishes the chances of survival of Yiddish from those of Djudeo-Espanyol (see below).
  • Persian is spoken or at least understood by most of the 200,000 or so Jews of Iranian descent in Israel.
  • English is considered the fifth most widely spoken language in the country and has had a special status since 1999. However, it can be assumed that for most speakers it is not their mother tongue, but their first foreign language. In contrast to French, which has a much higher proportion of native speakers in Israel (see above), English is a compulsory subject for all Israeli students.
  • Romanian is spoken by approximately 82,000 Romanian first generation Jews and 126,000 second generation Jews in Israel.
  • Spanish is spoken by 1.6% of the total population. The speakers are mostly immigrants from South America ; there are also immigrants from Spain.
  • Amharic is spoken by most of the Ethiopian Jews . The language has around 130,000 speakers in Israel who or whose parents immigrated since the 1980s.
  • German is spoken by around 100,000 Israelis and is valued by many as a cultural language, even if the position of German has only improved in recent decades after the Holocaust. In the meantime, German can be learned as a foreign language at some schools and German language and literature can be studied at Israeli universities.
  • Hungarian is spoken by most of the roughly 32,000 Hungarian Jews and their descendants in the country. In total there are around 70,000 speakers.
  • Djudeo-Espanyol is still spoken by around 20,000 people according to pessimistic estimates and by around 100,000 people in Israel according to more optimistic estimates who come from countries of the former Ottoman Empire (e.g. Turkey, the Balkans, Greece, Bulgaria, North Africa). Since Israel is the only country with a relatively significant number of speakers, but the language here has no official status and is not established as the language of instruction, Djudeo-Espanyol threatens to become extinct. There is almost no immigration of speakers from the Djudeo-Espanyol that could strengthen the group of speakers in Israel. Outside Israel there are only around 5,000 to 10,000 speakers. In the 1960s it was assumed that there were around 300,000 speakers in Israel; the loss results from assimilation to the Israeli living conditions.
  • Ukrainian is spoken by immigrants from Ukraine and has around 20,000 to 40,000 speakers. Many immigrants from Ukraine also speak Russian (see there).
  • Greek is spoken by about 35,000 residents of Israel. It is the language of several Christian Orthodox churches in the country.
  • Bukhari: Variants of Tajik or Persian spoken by immigrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and occasionally from Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan .
  • New Aramaic : Approx. 6000 to 7000 speakers of the Jewish-Aramaic dialects Lishanid noshan and Lishana didan . These are immigrants from northern Iraq, south-east Turkey and Iranian Azerbaijan, especially from the Kurdish areas (e.g. around Erbil), where mostly Christian, but also Jewish Aramaic-speaking minorities remained until the 20th century. Almost all Jewish Aramaic speakers live in Israel today; many are older than 40 years, so that Jewish New Aramaic threatens to die out in a few decades.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Israel , pagina Ethnologue. Retrieved October 8, 2014.
  2. ^ Israel Central Bureau of Statistics : Selected Data from the 2011 Social Survey on Mastery of the Hebrew Language and Usage of Languages ​​(Hebrew Only) . Retrieved October 12, 2013. 
  3. ^ Max Weinreich : History of the Yiddish Language . Vol. 1, Yale University Press, 2008, p. 311, ISBN 0-300-10960-1
  4. This is how the Yiddish-speaking actor Nathan Wolfowicz described it in the Israeli-Yiddish newspaper Last Naies on July 20, 1951. A Hebrew translation ( memento of the original from October 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked . Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of this article by Rachel Rozhenski appeared in Haaretz on March 3rd , 2004. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.haaretz.co.il
  5. Dr. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, Relations between Jews and Arabs during Israel's first decade (in Hebrew) .
  6. ^ Knesset Hawks Move To Strip Arabic of Official Status in Israel . In: The Forward . Retrieved May 4, 2012.
  7. Shahar Ilan: MKs: Make Hebrew the only official language . In: Haaretz . February 17, 2012. Retrieved May 4, 2012.
  8. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Immigration/immigration_by_country2.html
  9. So from once French-speaking countries
  10. Emanuel Goldsmith: Modern Yiddish culture: the story of the Yiddish language movement. Fordham University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-8232-1695-0 , p. 58 ("The linguistic dualism between Hebrew and Yiddish was similar to that between Hebrew and Aramaic in previous generations.")
  11. ^ Yiddish, Eastern
  12. High Court of Justice, case 4112/99, paragraphs 11–12 ( Memento of the original from October 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / elyon1.court.gov.il
  13. Statistical Abstract of Israel 2013 - No. 64 Subject 2.
  14. Evelyne Bartolmai: German Language Slowly Losing Taboo Status in Israel ( Archive ( Memento from June 11, 2015 on WebCite )). German wave . June 18, 2006. Accessed June 11, 2015.
  15. ^ "Growing Demand for Italian Language Courses in Israel", Note Italiane , No. May 23, 2003 ( Memento of March 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  16. General information about language courses at Technion (regarding Italian language courses) .
  17. Sergio DellaPergola: "World Jewish Population, 2010" ( Memento from June 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive )