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The Hebrew Language
About 5 million people in the world speak Hebrew; the majority of them live in Israel (4, 510, 000), where Hebrew is the official language, the rest in United States (101, 686 speakers)."Square" is the script by which modern Hebrew is written. Square derives from Aramaic and for two thousand years it has been used for copying Bible books in Hebrew. Since it also has a cursive version, the script can be handwritten.
History
Hebrew has originated from the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. In the past, the majority of Hebrews lived in the Persian Empire, which had Aramic as its Official language. For this reason, Old Hebrew included Aramic words, expressions and writing system. During the 2300 years of Persian domination, Hebrew was no more used as a language, even if in this long period of time there have been various attempts to keep the language alive. One of these was connected to religion, as one of the oldest books written in Hebrew was the Bible.But the real revival of Hebrew started only in the second half of the 19th century and had as its leader Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who, after being a revolutionary in Tsarist Russia joined the Jewish national movement and finally emigrated to Palestine in 1881. The starting point for Ben-Yehuda's reform of the language was Biblical Hebrew, which he shaped and adapted to modern times. Ben-Yehuda incorporated to the biblical vocabulary new foreign words which he had learnt by the numerous European Hebrew speakers. What is more, he rearranged some grammar rules and adopted standard Western pronunciation.
Modern Hebrew shows influences from Russian (for example, the Russian suffix -acia is used in nouns where English has the suffix -ation); German (particularly in combination words like "tapuakh-adama," meaning potato (German Erdapfel). English has been a very strong influence, both from British influence during the period of the Mandate and American influence in the present day. Finally, Arabic, being the language of numerous Mizrahic and Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Arab countries as well as of the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, has also had an important influence on Hebrew, especially in slang (for example, "sababa", meaning "excellent", or "y'alla", meaning "come on.")