Modern Hebrew phonology

A limited number of Oriental speakers, for example elderly Yemenite Jews, even maintain some pharyngealized (emphatic) consonants also found in Arabic, such as /sˤ/ for Biblical /tsʼ/.

Israeli Arabs ordinarily use the Oriental pronunciation, vocalising the ‘ayin (ע‎) as /ʕ/, resh (ר) as [r] and, less frequently, the ḥet (ח‎) as /ħ/.

Non-Oriental (and General Israeli) pronunciation lost the emphatic and pharyngeal sounds of Biblical Hebrew under the influence of European languages (Slavic and Germanic for Ashkenazim and Romance for Sephardim).

[citation needed] However, according to Sephardic and Ashkenazic authorities, such as the Mishnah Berurah and the Shulchan Aruch and Mishneh Torah, /ʕ/ is the proper pronunciation.

However, in some Ashkenazi dialects of northern Europe it was a uvular rhotic, either a trill [ʀ] or a fricative [ʁ].

Some Iraqi Jews also pronounce rêš as a guttural [ʀ], reflecting Baghdad Jewish Arabic.

However, just like him, the first waves of Jews to resettle in the Holy Land were Ashkenazi, and Standard Hebrew would come to be spoken with their native pronunciation.

Consequently, by now nearly all Israeli Jews pronounce the consonant ר rêš as a uvular approximant ([ʁ̞]),[6][7]: 261  which also exists in Yiddish.

[8] 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.

The following table lists the consonant phonemes of Israeli Hebrew in IPA transcription:[9] For many young speakers, obstruents assimilate in voicing.

These phonemic changes were partly due to the mergers noted above, to the loss of consonant gemination, which had distinguished stops from their fricative allophones in intervocalic position, and the introduction of syllable-initial /f/ and non-syllable-initial /p/ and /b/ in loan words.

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").

Sequences of dental stops reduce to a single consonant, again except at the end of a prosodic unit: but: שֶׁלָּמַדְתִּי [ʃela'madeti] ('that I studied')