 Hi friends and subscribers, welcome back to my YouTube channel, my name is Daniel Rosel and this channel focuses on aspects of living in Israel. Did you ever wonder how many Israelis speak English? Or where English stands in the ranking of languages spoken in Israel at the mother tongue level? As a Jewish homeland, Israel has been welcoming immigrants from Jewish communities all over the world since 1948. In fact, it's been doing so since well before the foundation of the modern state and Israel has become a linguistic, kaleidoscope of sorts in the process. It has also proven itself to be a melting pot and the backdrop for the development of a new language adapted from an ancient one, modern Hebrew. The form of spoken modern Hebrew that has evolved since Ben Yehuda pioneered its revival from biblical origins has been influenced heavily by languages spoken among immigrants to Israel, especially by speakers of Yiddish and Arabic. Other languages like Amharic, Russian, English and French all have large native speaker communities in Israel, creating a kind of monopoly of language-bound microcosms within the state. There are, for example, English-centric Facebook groups in Israel which have tens of thousands of members in them, French newspapers that are published once a week, and grocery stores where all the signage you'll see is written in Russian. As modern Hebrew is a young language and Israel is such a colorful linguistic climate, the evolution of second language acquisition and progress in Hebrew are both subjects of national interest to demographers. Therefore, Israel's national statistics body, the Central Bureau of Statistics, or CBS, includes various linguistic questions among those which it includes in a periodic survey of Israelis. In this research, it includes the level of familiarity and competence with Hebrew to assess immigrants' progress in attaining proficiency. The level of proficiency in written and spoken Hebrew are both polled, and it also polls respondents for their mother tongues to map the ranking and evolution of these different linguistic groups in Israel. The latest data was polled in 2021 and computed and released the following year, 2022, and here is the ranking of speakers according to their mother tongue. Note that the information includes only those 20 years old and older, so in a sense these numbers are backwards looking as they'll reflect patterns of older immigrants but not those who moved here at a young age with a language other than Hebrew as their native tongue. This is followed in second place by 20% of the population which speaks Arabic as a first language, a number accounted for by Israel's large Israeli-Arab and Druze demographics. In third place, 15% of the Jewish population speaks Russian as a first language and only in fourth place comes English with 2.1% of the Jewish population speaking it as a first language. If we go further down the list, we have French at 1.7%, Spanish at 1.3%, Yiddish at 1.6% and 5% you have a different mother language. Note that this data was sampled at the national level. I've been working on finding the numbers for Jerusalem specifically, but I've been having a hard time getting that information from local authorities. Maybe nobody's collected the data in the first place, maybe nobody really cares, but either way, getting anything better than rough estimates has been kind of tricky. The local data interests me because I imagine it might show a rather different picture from the national one. In municipalities with more ultra-orthodox residents like Jerusalem, I imagine that Yiddish would almost certainly be substantially higher than the 1.6% of native language speakers it's marked at in the national survey. And in so-called English speaking or Anglophone strongholds, levels of English speaking at the mother tongue level would be probably higher as well. Some of the findings pertain specifically to the Jewish population in Israel because speaker numbers in the Arabic population are assumed to be pretty negligible. An example of that might be the number of Israeli-Arab speaking Yiddish as a mother tongue. This number can be assumed to be very close to zero or zero with a pretty good degree of certitude. Nevertheless, looking at the picture at the national level, the numbers are I think pretty revealing. I would guess that most English speakers would be surprised to know that only 2.6% of the population of Israel speaks English as a mother tongue. This number translates to only about 1 in 38 Israelis. It's also interesting to me at least that native Russian speakers outnumber native English speakers by such a wide margin. In total, there are more than 746,000 Israelis who speak Russian as a mother tongue according to this estimate. And that's compared to only about 124,000 who speak English. That factor of difference works out to over six-fold. As different population groups come and go, immigrating and emigrating, these numbers can be expected to be in a state of flux. Much as with Jewish immigration or aliyah, it can be expected that the overall number of mother tongue speakers of languages besides Hebrew will decline, and in parallel, rates of knowledge of Hebrew will continue to increase. If you find this assortment of facts interesting and would like to get more videos from me about different socioeconomic issues related to life in Israel, then please consider liking this video, sharing it with your friends or on Facebook groups, and subscribing to this YouTube channel.