A Time Capsule: Change and Preservation in a Hebrew Speaker’s Language over Fifty Years

Abstract

This article presents a panel study examining the language of a single speaker over a span of 51 years. The speaker, born in Palestine in the early 20th century, represents a linguistic model of an Ashkenazi native speaker from the first generation of Modern Hebrew. He was recorded twice: once in 1960 and again in 2011, speaking freely about his life for approximately two hours at each point in time. The study compares these recordings, analyzing morphological and syntactic features common to both periods, and identifies trends of change and preservation across a fifty-year lifespan.