Hebrew on the phone and in text messages

If you have learned French or German, you expect a phone call to come with a gear change: a polite pronoun, a different verb ending, a little distance built into the grammar. Hebrew does not have one. There is no formal you to switch into, and nobody is waiting for you to use it.

The gear change is real, but it happens somewhere else. Hebrew marks gender on verbs in the present tense, on adjectives, and on the word you. On a call you have to commit to one within your first sentence, out loud, before you have worked out who you are speaking to. In a typed message you often do not have to commit at all, because the alphabet leaves the vowels out and the two forms come out looking identical. Israelis know this and lean on it.

One warning about the respellings below. They are a crutch. The kh is a scrape at the back of the throat, not an English k, and the Hebrew r is made further back in the mouth than yours. Stress falls on the last syllable unless the respelling shows otherwise.

Modern Hebrew uses the same word for you with everyone: your closest friend, your landlord, a police officer, a government minister. The formal second person that existed in older written Hebrew is gone from speech, and reviving it would sound like a joke. What is left of politeness sits in two places: a couple of titles you can attach to a sentence, and the fixed formulas at the top and bottom of anything written.

So the register question in Hebrew is almost never which pronoun. It is whether you are brief or warm, whether you shorten words, and whether you end with a blessing or with bye.

Hebrew has a word that exists only for the telephone. It is borrowed, everybody uses it, and you will not meet it anywhere else.

When you ask for someone, the reply tells you their gender before anything else does. The single word that means speaking has two forms, and the person on the other end picks one without thinking about it.

Hebrew is written without most of its vowels. That is not a problem for a reader who knows the word, but it has a side effect that matters enormously in messages: pairs of words that sound different are spelled the same. How are you is the clearest case. Said to a man and said to a woman, it ends differently. Typed, it is one string of letters and the reader supplies the ending themselves.

Not everything hides. Plenty of feminine forms add a letter you can see, and there the message gives you away as surely as speech would.

When a notice has to address a mixed group, or when a writer genuinely does not know who is reading, Hebrew solves it with a slash and the feminine ending tacked on. You will see this constantly in invitations, job adverts and group messages.

There is a simpler escape, and it is the one to learn. Some of the most common greetings carry no gender at all, which makes them the safest thing to type to a name you cannot read.

Open an Israeli group chat and a quarter of the short words will not be in your dictionary. Hebrew abbreviates aggressively, and it marks the abbreviations with punctuation you can learn in a minute. A double mark before the last letter means an acronym made of several words. A single mark after a letter means the word has been cut short, or that the letter is standing in for a number.

The habit to take from this: the letters are not a new word. You expand them in your head and read the full phrase aloud. On a keyboard most people type a plain quote mark rather than the proper Hebrew one, so expect both shapes.

A message to a friend opens with a borrowed hi and the person's name, and that is the entire greeting. There is no Hebrew equivalent of writing Dear Sarah to someone you know.

The real formality lives at the bottom. Hebrew sign-offs are a short ladder, and picking the right rung is most of what makes written Hebrew sound right.

Do not reach for the plural you as a politeness device. If you address one person with the plural form because that is what your first language does, a Hebrew speaker will simply assume you are writing to several people and look around for the others.

Do not sign a message to a friend with the formal ending. Yours sincerely at the foot of a two line text to someone you had coffee with yesterday reads as sarcasm, and it is the kind of sarcasm nobody will explain to you.

And do not guess gender. Writing to a woman in masculine forms is not a neutral default in Hebrew, it is wrong, and it is the error people notice fastest. If the name on the screen tells you nothing, use the genderless greetings, use thank you, or use the slash form. Any of those is better than a coin toss.

Hebrew has far less geographic variation than most languages its age, because the modern spoken language was rebuilt within living memory in one small country. What varies is not where you are but who is writing. Age shows in which slang appears. Religious observance shows at the very top of the message: a sender from a religious background may open an email or even a document with a three letter blessing before the first word of content, and religious correspondence carries a whole layer of older abbreviations that secular writing does not use.

The borrowed layer is shared by everyone. A good deal of everyday Israeli slang comes from Arabic and crosses every group and generation.

Outside Israel you will also meet Hebrew typed in Latin letters, by people on keyboards without a Hebrew layout. There is no agreed spelling system for it, so the same word will reach you in three shapes from three people.

The third channel is the one that undoes everything above. Voice messages are a normal part of Israeli messaging, not a last resort, and the moment someone sends one, all the gender the keyboard was hiding comes back. A typed word that could have been either is now spoken, and it has committed. If you are hiding behind the written ambiguity, a voice note is where you stop hiding.

Expect written Hebrew to be shorter than you would write in English, with fewer softeners. A reply that is one word and a full stop is not curt. Padding a request with layers of apology is what sounds strange.

Learn הלו, רגע and מה נשמע first. The first gets you onto a call, the second buys you time on it, and the third greets anyone without forcing you to guess their gender.

Then add בברכה, so that anything you write can be closed properly. Everything else on this page you will pick up from the messages people send you, which is the right way round.