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Sounds and pronunciation of Modern Hebrew

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.

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 (ע) as , resh (ר) as [r] and, less frequently, the ḥet (ח) as .

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. which also exists in Yiddish. 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.

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.

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").