Israel’s geographical position as a land bridge connecting Europe, Asia and Africa, its history of repeated conquest, and its centrality for three major religions have assured a long tradition of multilingualism. Two thousand years ago triglossia reigned, with Hebrew, Judeo-Aramaic and Greek playing meaningful roles. Multilingualism was the norm for the Jewish people during most of the Dispersion, with separate functions: Hebrew and Talmudic Aramaic for religious and literacy purposes, Jewish languages like Yiddish, Ladino or Judeo-Arabic for community and home functions (Rabin 1981), and one or more “co-territorial vernaculars” for communication with Gentiles. Current Israeli multilingualism began to take shape with the return of Jews to Palestine in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Subsequent revitalization of Hebrew (Fellman 1973; Myhill 2004) was central to nation-building, providing a common vernacular for the integration of a steady stream of immigrants (Bachi 1956), and guaranteed linguistic diversity (Cooper 1984).

The close of the nineteenth century brought changes in the pattern of multilingualism. Turkish was the language of Ottoman soldiers and government officials. Village and town-dwellers spoke local dialects of Arabic. Classical Arabic was the written language of the educated elite. Indigenous Sephardic Jews spoke Arabic, too, but inside the community the language was Judezmo. French, German and English were encouraged by missionary churches and foreign consuls (Spolsky and Cooper 1991). Ashkenazi Jews arriving from Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, also bringing with them co-territorial vernaculars like Russian, Polish and Hungarian.