Modern Hebrew phonology

Modern Hebrew 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 (the time of the beginning of the Zionist movement and the Hebrew revival) there were three groups of Hebrew regional accents: Ashkenazi (Eastern European), Sephardi (Southern European), and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern, Iranian, and North African). Over time features of these systems of pronunciation merged, and at present scholars identify two main pronunciations of modern (i.e., not liturgical) Hebrew: Oriental and Non-Oriental. Oriental Hebrew displays traits of an Arabic substrate. Elder oriental speakers tend to use an alveolar trill, preserve the pharyngeal consonants and (less commonly) , preserve gemination, and pronounce  in some places where non-Oriental speakers do not have a vowel (the shva na). A limited number of Oriental speakers, for example elderly Yemenite Jews, even maintain some pharyngealized (emphatic) consonants also found in Arabic, such as for Biblical. Israeli Arabs ordinarily use the Oriental pronunciation, vocalising the ‘ayin as, resh (ר) as [r] and, less frequently, the ḥet  as.

Pronunciation of $⟨ע⟩$
Non-Oriental (and General Israeli) pronunciation lost the emphatic and pharyngeal sounds of Biblical Hebrew under the influence of Indo-European languages (Germanic and Slavic for Ashkenazim and Romance for Sephardim). 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 $⟨ר⟩$
The classical pronunciation associated with the consonant 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.

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 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 (or "standardised") 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:


 * * Phoneme was introduced through loanwords.
 * 1 In modern Hebrew  for ח has merged with  (which was traditionally used only for fricative כ) into . Some older Mizrahi speakers still separate these (as explained above).
 * 2 The glottal consonants tend to be elided, which is most common in unstressed syllables. In informal speech it may occur in stressed syllables as well, whereas careful or formal speech may retain them in all positions. In modern Hebrew for ע has been absorbed by, which was traditionally used only for . Again, some speakers still separate these.
 * 3 is usually pronounced as a uvular approximant, and sometimes as a uvular trill , alveolar trill  or alveolar flap , depending on the background of the speaker.
 * 4 While the phoneme  was introduced through borrowings, it can appear in native words as a sequence of   and   as in.

For many young speakers, obstruents assimilate in voicing. Voiceless obstruents (stops/affricates and fricatives ) become voiced  when they appear immediately before voiced obstruents, and vice versa. For example:


 * > ('to close'),  >
 * > ('a right'),  >
 * > ('a bill'),  >
 * > ('a printer'),  >
 * > ('security'),  >

is pronounced before velar consonants.

Historical sound changes
Standard Israeli Hebrew (SIH) phonology, based on the Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation tradition, has a number of differences from Biblical Hebrew (BH) and Mishnaic Hebrew (MH) in the form of splits and mergers.
 * BH/MH and  merged into SIH.
 * BH/MH and  merged into SIH.
 * BH/MH and  generally merge into SIH  or became silent, but the distinction is maintained in the speech of older Sephardim and is reintroduced in the speech of some other speakers.
 * BH/MH had two allophones,  and, which split into separate phonemes  and  in SIH.
 * BH/MH had two allophones,  and . The  allophone merged with  into SIH . A new phoneme  was introduced in loanwords (see Hebrew vav as consonant), so SIH has phonemic.
 * BH/MH had two allophones,  and . The  allophone merged with  into SIH, while the  allophone merged with  into SIH , though a distinction between  and  is maintained in the speech of older Sephardim.
 * BH/MH, and  merged into their plosive counterparts, ,  and.
 * BH/MH de-pharyngealized and affricated to SIH.
 * BH/MH backed to SIH, the former pronunciation is still used by Sephardi and Mizrahi speakers.

Spirantization
The consonant pairs – (archaically ), – (archaically ), and – (archaically ) were historically allophonic, as a consequence of a phenomenon of spirantisation known as begadkefat under the influence of the Aramaic language on BH/MH. In Modern Hebrew, the above six sounds are phonemic.

The full inventory of Hebrew consonants which undergo and/or underwent spirantisation are:

However, the above-mentioned allophonic alternation of BH/MH –, – and – was lost in Modern Hebrew, with these six 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" (see Mappiq). The final H sound is hardly ever pronounced in Modern Hebrew. However, the final H with Mappiq still retains the guttural characteristic that it should take a patach and render the pronunciation /a(h)/ at the end of the word, for example, גָּבוֹהַּ gavoa(h) ("tall").

Vowels


Modern Hebrew has a simple five-vowel system.

Vowel length is non-contrastive and consecutive identical vowels are allowed in the case of glottal consonant elision, e.g. שאלה vs שלה  and רעם  vs רם.

There are two diphthongs, and.

Vowel length
In Biblical Hebrew, each vowel had three forms: short, long and interrupted (chataf). However, there is no audible distinction between the three in Modern Hebrew, except that is often pronounced  as in Ashkenazi Hebrew.

Shva
Modern pronunciation does not follow traditional use of the niqqud (diacritic) "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 (fem.) crumpled' is pronounced   though historically it was silent, whereas the shva in  ('time'), which was pronounced historically, is usually silent. Orthographic shva is generally pronounced in prefixes such as ve- ('and') and be- ('in'), or when following another shva in grammatical patterns, as in  ('you [f. sg.] will learn'). An epenthetic appears when necessary to avoid violating a phonological constraint, such as between two consonants that are identical or differ only in voicing (e.g.  'I learned', not ) (though this rule is lost in some younger speakers and quick speech) or when an impermissible initial cluster would result (e.g.  or, where C stands for any consonant). Guttural consonants (א, ה, ח, ע) rarely take a shva. Instead, they can take reduced segol (חֱ), reduced patach (חֲ), or reduced kamatz (חֳ).

Stress
Stress is phonemic in Modern Hebrew. There are two frequent patterns of lexical stress, on the last syllable (milrá מִלְּרַע) and on the penultimate syllable (mil‘él מִלְּעֵיל). 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 farther back. This often occurs in loanwords, e.g.  ('politics'), and sometimes in native colloquial compounds, e.g.   ('somehow'). Colloquial stress has often shifted from the last syllable to the penultimate, e.g. 'hat', normative  (Ezekiel 38 5) or  (Isaiah 59 17), colloquial (always) ;  ('dovecote'), normative, colloquial. This shift is common in the colloquial pronunciation of many personal names, for example ('David'), normative, colloquial.

Historically, stress was phonemic, but bore low functional load. While minimal pairs existed (e.g., 'in/with us' and  , 'they built'), stress was mostly predictable, depending on syllable weight (that is, vowel length and whether a syllable ended in a consonant). Because spoken Israeli Hebrew has lost gemination (a common source of syllable-final consonants) 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 (assuming the vowels are even written):

Morphophonology
In fast-spoken colloquial Hebrew, when a vowel falls beyond two syllables from the main stress of a word or phrase, it may be reduced or elided. For example:


 * זֹאת אוֹמֶרֶת
 * > ('that is to say')


 * ?אֵיךְ קוֹרְאִים לְךָ
 * > (what's your name, lit. 'How are you called?')

When follows an unstressed vowel, it is sometimes elided, possibly with the surrounding vowels:


 * אַבָּא שֶׁלָּכֶם
 * > ('your father')


 * הוּא יִתֵּן לְךָ
 * > ('he will give / let you')

Syllables drop before  except at the end of a prosodic unit:


 * בְּדֶרֶךְ כְּלָל
 * > ('usually')

but: הוּא בַּדֶּרֶךְ ('he is on his way') 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:


 * אֲנִי לָמַדְתִּי פַּעַם
 * > ('I once studied')

but: שֶׁלָּמַדְתִּי ('that I studied')