The History of Conflict between Institutional and Native Hebrew in Israel

Abstract

Contemporary popular discourse on Hebrew prescriptivism betrays an interesting ambivalence: acceptance of institutional standards on the one hand and objection to normative intervention on the other. This ambivalence can be traced to the tension between the Language Committee and the Palestine Teachers’ Association during the Second Aliyah. Both advocated that Israel adopt a modern national language, but the former was in favor of a systematic language planning, while the latter was in favor of spontaneous language adoption. In the 1950s, a similar tension developed between the older generation and the Sabras (native speakers), whose generational identity had crystallized during the pre-State period. The language promoted by the former group was an institutional variety bound to a prescriptive norm, while that promoted by the latter was a native variety bound to conventional norms and real-life experience. The tension in these two episodes led to a deep cultural rift—one that is familiar to every Hebrew speaker in Israel—between the formal language of the state and the natural language of Hebrew speakers. A crosslinguistic perspective reveals a resemblance between Israeli Hebrew and European Late Dialect Selection languages, suggesting that the ambivalence towards prescriptivism in fact indicates ambivalence towards the national language, which is perceived, simultaneously, as a manifestation of a