Modern Hebrew - Phonology - Changes in Resh Pronunciation - Israeli Hebrew

Israeli Hebrew

Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin, and pronounced the Hebrew rhotic as an alveolar trill, identical to Arabic ر rāʾ . Under pressure to assimilate, many of them began pronouncing their Hebrew rhotic as a voiced uvular fricative, often identical to Arabic غ ġayn. However, in modern Sephardic and Mizrahi poetry and folk music, as well as in the standard (or "standardized") Hebrew used in the Israeli media, an alveolar rhotic is sometimes used.

Oriental speakers tend to use an alveolar trill rather than the uvular trill, preserve the pharyngeal consonants /ħ/ and (less commonly) /ʕ/ rather than merging them with /χ ʔ/, preserve gemination, and pronounce /e/ in some places where non-Oriental speakers have null (the so-called shva na). There are mixed views on the status of the two accents. On the one hand, prominent Israelis of Sephardic or Oriental origin are admired for the purity of their speech and Yemenite Jews are often employed as newsreaders. On the other hand, the speech of middle-class Ashkenazim is regarded as having a certain Central European sophistication, and many speakers of Mizrahi origin have moved nearer to this version of Standard Hebrew, in some cases even adopting the uvular resh.

The pairs /b/~/v/, /k/~/χ/, and /p/~/f/ were historically allophonic, as a consequence of the phenomenon of spirantization known as begadkefat. In Modern Hebrew, however, all six sounds are sometimes phonemic.

This phonemic divergence might be due to a number of factors: mergers involving formerly distinct sounds (historical pronunciation /w/ of vav merging with fricative bet, becoming /v/, historical pronunciation /q/ of kuf merging with plosive kaf, becoming /k/, and historical pronunciation /ħ/ of het merging with fricative kaf, becoming /x/), loss of consonant gemination, which formerly distinguished the stop members of the pairs from the fricatives when intervocalic, and the introduction of syllable-initial /f/ and non-syllable-initial /p/ and /b/ (see Begadkefat).