A spoken language was brought back from books

Hebrew, used for scripture and scholarship for centuries, was rebuilt as a daily spoken language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

After antiquity, Hebrew remained a written language of prayer, law, and letters. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and a network of schools, newspapers, and households in Ottoman and then British Palestine insisted on speaking it at the table. New words were coined for train, ice cream, and match. The children of those households became the first native speakers in centuries.

It is the clearest case of a language returned to everyday life from a written corpus. The revival had a political project under it and a great deal of argument about whose Hebrew. The linguistic fact stands: a vernacular that had been silent is noisy again.