Research is conducted on different aspects of Hebrew, including its place among its sister languages. The Department is committed to teaching and research, particularly regarding the people who speak and write the language, and the psychological, social, geographical, and technological factors that motivate them.
Areas of research include:
Historical-philological aspects of Hebrew and Jewish literature and their linguistic structure (phonology, morphology, grammar, lexicon, and semantics):
v Biblical Hebrew and its relation to other ancient Semitic languages
v Rabbinic Hebrew and the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls, along with the different Hebrew dialects of their time
v Various genres of Medieval Hebrew
v Hebrew in the modern era: the enlightenment period, the revival period, and the present day
Linguistic and sociolinguistic factors of Hebrew in different contexts and modalities (such as speech and writing):
v Interrelations between language, society, culture and ideology
v Pragmatics and discourse analysis
Projects include:
v A dictionary of biblical Hebrew, in cooperation with other BGU departments
v Bedouin dialects of the Negev
