Revival of the Hebrew language many Jews spoke a related Semitic language, Aramaic.) From the 2nd century CE until the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language "circa" 1880, Hebrew served as a literary and official language and as the Judaic language of prayer. After the spoken usage of Mishnaic Hebrew ended in the 2nd century CE, Hebrew had not been spoken as a mother tongue. Even so, during the Middle Ages, Jews used the language in a wide variety of disciplines. This usage kept alive a substantial portion of the traits characteristic of Hebrew. First and foremost, Classical Hebrew was preserved in full through
Revival of the Hebrew language language to express psychological realism and interiority for the first time. As Hebrew poets and writers began arriving in Palestine armed with the new literary language, they exerted a certain amount of influence on the development of spoken Hebrew as well. Jewish communities with different colloquial languages had used Hebrew to communicate with each other across Europe and the Near East since the Middle Ages. As Jews in Palestine spoke a variety of languages such as Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, and French, inter-communal affairs that required verbal communication were handled in a modified form of Medieval Hebrew. Hebrew was used by