Modern Hebrew phonology


is phonetically simpler than Biblical Hebrew and has fewer phonemes, but it is phonologically more complex. It has 25 to 27 consonants and 5 to 10 vowels, depending on the speaker and the analysis.
Hebrew has been used primarily for liturgical, literary, and scholarly purposes for most of the past two millennia. As a consequence, its pronunciation was strongly influenced by the vernacular of individual Jewish communities. With the revival of Hebrew as a native language, and especially with the establishment of Israel, the pronunciation of the modern language rapidly coalesced.
The two main accents of modern Hebrew are Oriental and Non-Oriental. Oriental Hebrew was chosen as the preferred accent for Israel by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, but has since declined in popularity. The description in this article follows the language as it is pronounced by native Israeli speakers of the younger generations.

Oriental and non-Oriental accents

According to the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in the 1880s there were three groups of Hebrew regional accents: Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi. Over time features of these systems of pronunciation merged, and nowadays we find two main pronunciations of colloquial - not liturgical - Hebrew: Oriental and Non-Oriental. Oriental Hebrew displays traits of an Arabic substrate.
Old oriental speakers tend to use an alveolar trill, preserve the pharyngeal consonants and , preserve gemination, and pronounce in some places where non-Oriental speakers do not have a vowel. A limited number of Oriental speakers, for example old Yemenite Jews, even maintain some pharyngealized consonants also found in Arabic, such as for Biblical.

Pronunciation of

Non-Oriental pronunciation lost the emphatic and pharyngeal sounds of Biblical Hebrew under the influence of Indo-European languages. The pharyngeals and are preserved by older Oriental speakers.
Dialectally, Georgian Jews pronounce as, while Western European Sephardim and Dutch Ashkenazim traditionally pronounce it, a pronunciation that can also be found in the Italian tradition and, historically, in south-west Germany. However, according to Sephardic and Ashkenazic authorities, such as the Mishnah Berurah and the Shulchan Aruch and Mishneh Torah, is the proper pronunciation. Thus, it is still pronounced as such by some Sephardim and Ashkenazim.

Pronunciation of

The classical pronunciation associated with the consonant ר rêš was a flap, and was grammatically ungeminable. In most dialects of Hebrew among the Jewish diaspora, it remained a flap or a trill. However, in some Ashkenazi dialects of northern Europe it was a uvular rhotic, either a trill or a fricative. This was because most native dialects of Yiddish were spoken that way, and the liturgical Hebrew of these speakers carried the Yiddish pronunciation. Some Iraqi Jews also pronounce rêš as a guttural, reflecting Baghdad Jewish Arabic. An apparently unrelated uvular rhotic is believed to have appeared in the Tiberian pronunciation of Hebrew, where it may have coexisted with additional non-guttural articulations of depending on circumstances.
Though an Ashkenazi Jew in the Russian Empire, the Zionist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda based his Standard Hebrew on Sephardi Hebrew, originally spoken in Spain, and therefore recommended an alveolar. However, just like him, the first waves of Jews to resettle in the Holy Land were Ashkenazi, and Standard Hebrew would come to be spoken with their native pronunciation. Consequently, by now nearly all Israeli Jews pronounce the consonant ר rêš as a uvular approximant., which also exists in Yiddish.
Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin, and pronounced the Hebrew rhotic consonant as an alveolar trill, identical to Arabic ر rāʾ, and which followed the conventions of old Hebrew. In modern Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi poetry and folk music, as well as in the standard Hebrew used in the Israeli media, an alveolar rhotic is sometimes used.

Consonants

The following table lists the consonant phonemes of Israeli Hebrew in IPA transcription:
For some young speakers, obstruents assimilate in voicing. Voiceless obstruents become voiced when they appear immediately before voiced obstruents, and vice versa. For example:
is pronounced before velar consonants.

Illustrative words

Historical sound changes

Standard Israeli Hebrew phonology, based on the Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation tradition, has a number of differences from Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew in the form of splits and mergers.
The consonant pairs –, –, and – were historically allophonic, as a consequence of a phenomenon of spirantisation known as begadkefat. In Modern Hebrew, the six sounds are phonemic. Similar allophonic alternation of BH/MH –, – and – was lost, with the allophones merging into simple.
These phonemic changes were partly due to the mergers noted above, to the loss of consonant gemination, which had distinguished stops from their fricative allophones in intervocalic position, and the introduction of syllable-initial and non-syllable-initial and in loan words. Spirantization still occurs in verbal and nominal derivation, but now the alternations –, –, and – are phonemic rather than allophonic.

Loss of final H consonant

In Traditional Hebrew words can end with an H consonant, e.g. when the suffix "-ah" is used, meaning "her". The final H sound is hardly ever pronounced in Modern Hebrew.

Vowels

Modern Hebrew has a simple five-vowel system.
FrontCentralBack
High
Mid
Low

Long vowels may occur where two identical vowels were historically separated by a pharyngeal or glottal consonant, and the first was stressed. They also often occur when morphology brings two identical vowels together, but they are not predictable in that environment.
Any of the five short vowels may be realized as a schwa when far from lexical stress.
There are two diphthongs, and.

Vowel length

In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted. However, there is no audible distinction between the three in Modern Hebrew, except that is often pronounced as in Ashkenazi Hebrew.
Vowel length in Modern Hebrew is environmentally determined and not phonemic, it tends to be affected by the degree of stress, and pretonic lengthening may also occur, mostly in open syllables. When a glottal is lost, a two-vowel sequence arises, and they may be merged into a single long vowel:
Modern pronunciation does not follow traditional use of the niqqud "shva". In Modern Hebrew, words written with a shva may be pronounced with either or without any vowel, and this does not correspond well to how the word was pronounced historically. For example, the first shva in the word 'you crumpled' is pronounced though historically it was silent, whereas the shva in , which was pronounced historically, is usually silent. Orthographic shva is generally pronounced in prefixes such as ve- and be-, or when following another shva in grammatical patterns, as in . An epenthetic appears when necessary to avoid violating a phonological constraint, such as between two consonants that are identical or differ only in voicing or when an impermissible initial cluster would result.

Stress

Stress is phonemic in Modern Hebrew. There are two frequent patterns of lexical stress, on the last syllable and on the penultimate syllable. Final stress has traditionally been more frequent, but in the colloquial language many words are shifting to penultimate stress. Contrary to the prescribed standard, some words exhibit stress on the antepenultimate syllable or even further back. This often occurs in loanwords, e.g. , and sometimes in native colloquial compounds, e.g. . Colloquial stress has often shifted from the last syllable to the penultimate, e.g. 'hat', normative, colloquial ; , normative, colloquial. This shift is common in the colloquial pronunciation of many personal names, for example , normative, colloquial.
Historically, stress was predictable, depending on syllable weight. Because spoken Israeli Hebrew has lost gemination as well as the original distinction between long and short vowels, but the position of the stress often remained where it had been, stress has become phonemic, as the following table illustrates. Phonetically, the following word pairs differ only in the location of the stress; orthographically they differ also in the written representation of vowel length of the vowels :

Morphophonology

When a vowel falls beyond two syllables from the main stress of a word or phrase, it may be reduced or elided in colloquial Hebrew. For example:
When follows an unstressed vowel, it is elided, sometimes with the surrounding vowels:
Syllables drop before except at the end of a prosodic unit:
but: הוּא בַּדֶּרֶךְ at the end of a prosodic unit.
Sequences of dental stops reduce to a single consonant, again except at the end of a prosodic unit:
but: שֶׁלָּמַדְתִּי