Language change, prescriptive language, and spontaneous speech in Modern Hebrew: a corpus-based study of early recordings

Unlike most living languages, the use of Hebrew as a spoken language is characterized by historical discontinuity. In this article, I discuss certain features of spoken usage among the first generations of speakers of Modern Hebrew (henceforth: MH), using a unique corpus – ten hours of unstructured interviews recorded in 1956–1966 with speakers born between 1885–1925. Using these recordings, I suggest a distinction between two types of language change:Dynamic organic language change evident from the comparison between two stages of a spoken language.Disparity between the planned prescriptive language and the spoken language used from the first few decades of MH (henceforth: Early Modern Hebrew – EMH) through the present.This analysis sheds light on linguistic processes reflected in present-day Hebrew, as it allows us to distinguish between the two types of changes. My proposal is that dynamic language changes occurred in MH only when there is a language change among different generations of MH speakers. This type of changes is similar to the common linguistic changes of any other normal living language. By contrast, the second type of a change is the linguistic differences between MH and prescriptive language (which is based on Classical Hebrew) that do not reflect a process of normal language change, but a partial adoption (along with partial rejection) of the prescriptive language already by the first generations of speakers.