What languages are spoken in Israel? 

Amazing video as usual! Keep up the great work

The difference in Arabic dialects reflect the fact that the original Arabic conquerors were few in number which is also bourne out in regional DNA

סרטון מאוד חשוב. קיבלת עוקב

Very, very interesting Ben. Thank you!!

my family had been in israel for the past thousand years or so (yishuv yashan, lucky to be the 15th generation in jerusalem, prior to that from safed), and i was kind of dissapointed you didnt mention Yerushalmi yiddish, (which i speak with my grandfather and mother, as long as most of my family from my mothers side) - its a combination of german, ukrainian and romanian, but what makes it interesting and different is that about 40% of the vocabulary come from aramaic, and slang draws heavily from arabic and greek. it started in the diaspora with romanian- ukrainian yiddish speaking jews who make aliyah after the first crusades mixing in with the very small indigenous jewish population in israel who spoke aramaic and greek at the time, eventually the languages mixed into a type of yiddish that if you dont have a guide to get you through it, good luck understanding even 20% of it.

I grew up in Baltimore Md. Big Yiddish community there back in the 80s and 90s. I learned some by osmosis and some deliberately to do business there. It was for a time an international business language in Europe.

Nicely Done!

Very interesting - I shall watch again as there is a lot to absorb.

Dear Benjamin, with your stunning, keen, insightful and incredibly accurate reports you gained a subscriber! Thanks heaps for your eager dedication and grit to keep on walking the hard yet rewarding way of wisdom and knowledgeness! מודה על השקעתך הרבה ועל שקדנותך על כל פרט ופרט! אתה מבריק איש יקר, המשך הלאה ותגיע לשחקים! תודה

Randomly stumbled on this chsnnel not something i would really be interested in . But here i am now intrigued as hell haha great little channel all the best with it very well done 👍

This is exactly what I was wondering a few days ago!

This video made my day! Really appreciate the time and effort you put into this. As an Israeli I can confirm that indeed, it is very rarely that I encounter someone who doesn't know Hebrew at all, but it is very common to hear English, French, Russian and arabic in the streets. However, I was quite suprised to know that till this day we still have so many people who does not speak Hebrew as their first language.

Very interesting video. I think it's important to spread this kind of information most people ignore. Also, please make a video on Yiddish, its history and dialectology are amazing! (don't forget The Udmurt Yiddish)

hello, i just wanted to share some stories about my grandmother. she is a kurdish jew from persia (iran) and is quadralingual, she speaks hebrew, persian, kurdish and arabic. she made aliya to israel as a baby in the 50's and grew up in a small community in the periphery of israel where most other people in the community also spoke kurdish/persian. because she grew up near the northern border, the radio device in their house received signals from the nearby arabic speaking countries and so she became able to understand it and speak it too. a few years ago, we were on a family trip and we were going through switzerland. there we sat in a restaurant in a small town. the owner of the restaurant turned out to be a kurdish or persian speaker (i dont remember and i do not understand those languages myself). the owner started crying from happiness when he talked with my grandmother, as what we realised later, according to him it was his first time speaking the language in years. the owner ended up giving us a discount for our order. in recent time, my grandmother and grandfather actually became even more immersed in their unique culture and nearby cultures. they would fly to turkey multiple times a year. they watch turkish tv shows (which are popular in israel) and slowly building a foundation to speak basic turkish. they use youtube on their smart tv and put persian music in the house. on the contrast of their immersion in middle eastern culture, english is almost unintelligible to them. they struggle a lot with basic words and pronunciation. on the same trip i discussed previously, we were in france for one day. my grandmother wanted to ask someone for directions to a certain place and she asked me to do it since her english is very basic and i knew how to speak it more than her (yes, i do know its a bad idea to try to speak english in france). but i was very shy to ask someone and she ended up doing it anyway with her very broken and basic english. i do feel a little guilty for making my grandmother embarrass herself though. my grandmother is still dreaming about one day to be able to visit iran and the town she was born in and until then she and my grandfather are making their kurdish roots visible in all aspects of life.

I love your videos. You make me want to learn welsh.

Thanks, that was interesting. Did you finish your conversion?

I love the great work you are doing Ben! I remember that Ladino was very widely spoken in Iberia (Iberian Peninsula of course) north africa, parts of Greece and the Levant. It is said Thessalonica was the Jerusalem of Europe so much of Jews lived there and these Jews all spoke Spanish as first language. Imagine if Theodore Herzl s'idea of making Yiddish the official language, it would had make Israel (Judenstaat) a more European identity Question, is Yevanic (Romaniote) was a direct descent of the Greek language from the time of the Hellenestic period? I have to much to say, sorry for this flood of comments-question

thank you so much for this video. Very educational. I speak Romanian, would love to learn Hebrew (my dad was Jewish)

Benjamin (בנימין, Benyamin) in Hebrew means Southerner, literally Son of the South. Son = Ben = בן Yamin = South (also the right side) = ימין And fun fact, for Christians, Aramaic is the language of Jesus, but for Jews, Aramaic is the language of the Babylonian Talmud.

Amazing video, thank you. I would add also Adyge language since one of the minority languages here .

French! A diplomatic language? Yes, it is still used in the ICJ at the Hague. Lawyers and judges often switch from English to French & vice-versa. (Excuse my Latin). Monoglots are at a disadvantage. The lingua franca of the Thai Royal family was, until recently, French.

Great work Israel, in reviving Hebrew! You guys need to share some of that technique with your friends in Ireland. And maybe this is just me, but... shouldn't Americans be speaking Latin? C'mon guys...

19:42 Mathrati?! Are you talking about the Bene Israeli community who migrated from *Maharashtra* to Israel? They speak *Marathi.* As a _Maharashtrian_ myself I was fascinated to learn that we've such a community, since they're fellow *Marathi* speakers I consider them as my own people. That's why I was looking forward to *Marathi/मराठी* being mentioned & why I'm also disappointed that it wasn't mentioned at least not accurately. Imagine someone mentions Welsh but instead they're saying Wethls or something.

What's name of the ruins at 13:30?

Hebrew was definitely an officially recognised language in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.

Lets see if i can guess.hebrew yiddish aramaic Circassian ladino,arabic syriac? Amharic, ummm the other judeo- languages Georgian Romaniote italkim. Do the druze have a different language? Armenian....

The pieces of the jigsaw are set to reveal themselves in all their glory-Dioch, merci, kop-khun-krub, uhmm-goy.

Ikh farshteyn a bisl Yiddish, ober ken nisht redn gut ;) BTW, I have never met an Israeli that doesn't speak Hebrew, and most that I have come across while visiting the country, do speak at least rudimentary English.

Growing peaches and eating dishes with more cheeses than I knew existed the morini brython their fate has been predicted

That of Blood.

Based.

ווי אַ מאַמעשפּראַכיקע ייִדיש רעדנער פֿינד איך דעם ווידעאָ זייער אינטערעסאַנט 😌 אַ שיינעם דאַנק

6:06 unlike the "rights" jews enjoyed in the newly independent Muslim majority nations....

Blarney Stone

Kersinam

Fascinating video. As a someone born from a Palestinian father and an Israeli mother, it goes to show the diversity of my country. (And that does not at all mean I support the ongoing brutality of the Israeli government in Gaza). But regardless of politics, wonderful video about language

Due to yiddish they all made me think they're Germans, at work 😂. And I say,, why you speak German with me, I'm not German,,.

I didn't know arabic has such a prominent position in Israel. Weird that it's not used in Knesset. Unless you remember the horrific genocide going on as of this writing and while you made this video.

PERFECT LIAR!

Lies and double standards mostly. Most Americans understand them. The rest of the world thinks it's a dead language and must be phased out. For good.