Will Minority Languages Survive in the Information Society? An Israeli Point of View

Abstract

The article raises the role of the minority national language within a global information society. The Hebrew language is a unique case of the revival of a classic language. In the early twentieth century a project was carried out to establish a technical university in what was then called Palestine The founders preferred to teach in Gem an, the dominant international scientific language technology. They daimed that Hebrew was unsuitable for scientific discourse. The opposition succeeded in defeating the founders and thus guaranteed the use of Hebrew in the fields of science and technology. The changing relationships and tension between the local language and the international lingua franca is still subject to debate today and the events of the so-called language war have much to teach us.