The Rise of Modern Vernacular Hebrew: How Language Shapes Identity (and Vice Versa) with Ivy Sichel

In this talk, linguist Ivy Sichel will discuss the rise of modern vernacular Hebrew in the 1950s and related ideas - how using particular language variety can influence its speakers, and how speakers make the language their own.
How did the modern vernacular variety of Hebrew - the informal, everyday version of the language - come to eclipse the prestigious prescriptive variety of Hebrew to become the standard? How does value accrue to particular varieties of a language?
In this talk, Ivy Sichel will analyze the social meanings associated with the new native vernacular of Modern Hebrew, taking a positive stance towards the new native vernacular, which is constructed via differentiation from its alternatives (formal or text-based Hebrew).
The new vernacular is reflexive, and it speaks for itself with the authority of experience, as opposed to the traditional authority of the text. A speaker of modern vernacular Hebrew necessarily, and often unknowingly, possesses a positive attitude towards it, and is an active agent in the propagation of a new collective (of speakers) and its values.
The talk will explore this type of subjectivity, and the ways in which speakers participate in the dissemination of a collective set of ideas about the modern vernacular.
The talk will also explore the consolidation and dissemination of these values by particular individuals, with a focus on Ma Nishma, a weekly column written in Modern Hebrew published in the 1950s.