9. Pragmatics and politeness

How Modern Hebrew is used in talk: the directness of Israeli speech (dugri), address without a T/V distinction, gender in address and the debates about inclusive language, requests and their softeners, greetings, blessings and the religious formulas used by secular speakers, thanking and apologising, the discourse markers that fill everyday speech, swearing and its sources, irony, turn-taking, and the register gap between writing and speech. Grammar facts used here are in 07 Syntax (imperatives and the future, the counterfactual hayiti + participle) and 05 Verbs; vocabulary and slang sources in 08.

← README · ← 08 Lexicon and register · 10 Historical layers →

A caution. Pragmatic generalisations about "Israelis" describe tendencies of a heterogeneous society — secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, native-born and immigrant, Jewish and Arab speakers of Hebrew. The classic studies (Katriel 1986; Blum-Kulka 1982, 1987; Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989) are mostly from the 1980s and describe mainly the urban, secular, native-born middle class. Treat them as a baseline, not as a description of every speaker today.

Contents

• 9.1 Directness: dugri speech
• 9.2 Address: no T/V
• 9.3 Names, titles and honorifics
• 9.4 Gender in address and inclusive language
• 9.5 Requests
• 9.6 Greetings and partings
• 9.7 Blessings, wishes and formulas of the calendar
• 9.8 Religious formulas in secular mouths
• 9.9 Thanking, apologising, complimenting
• 9.10 Discourse markers
• 9.11 Interjections and response words
• 9.12 Swearing and insults
• 9.13 Irony, teasing and yihye beseder
• 9.14 Conversation: turn-taking, overlap, firgun
• 9.15 Written and spoken registers
• 9.16 Pragmatics in the grammar
• 9.17 For a machine reader
• References

9.1 Directness: dugri speech

Dugri (דוגרי, from Arabic dughri "straight", via Turkish doğru "straight, true") names a style of speech that Israelis themselves recognise as typical of the native-born sabra: saying what one thinks, plainly, without the cushioning that other cultures consider polite. Katriel (1986, Talking Straight) described it as a cultural code with its own ethos: sincerity is valued above smoothness, and speaking straight is a sign of respect for the hearer as someone able to take the truth. In her analysis, dugri talk is assertive, sincere and natural, and it presents itself as anti-style — a rejection of the "diaspora" politeness of European Jewish speech that the founders of the state associated with indirectness and deference.

Signals of dugri style:

• Disagreement stated directly: ze lo nakhon "that's not true / not right"; ata to'e "you're wrong".
• Opinions without hedges: ze lo tov "it's not good".
• Requests in the imperative or the future (§ 9.5).
• Meta-comments that license directness: ani agid lekha dugri "I'll tell you straight"; bli lehitkhanef "without sucking up"; bo nedaber takhles "let's talk business" (takhles, from Yiddish, "the bottom line").

Directness is not rudeness within the culture: Blum-Kulka (1987) found that Hebrew speakers rate direct requests as less impolite than English speakers do, because politeness is located elsewhere — in solidarity, warmth of tone, first names and diminutives, and shared informality. A Hebrew speaker who uses many hedges with friends can sound distant or manipulative.

9.2 Address: no T/V

Modern Hebrew has one form of "you" for every hearer: ata (M), at (F), atem (MPL), aten (FPL). There is no polite plural or third-person address as in French vous, German Sie or Ukrainian Ви. A soldier addresses a general, a child a teacher, a citizen a minister with ata/at.

The rare third-person address ha'im ha-adon yirtse... "would the gentleman like…" is ironic or extremely formal (waiters in a parody, old-fashioned letters). Respect is carried instead by titles (§ 9.3), by the formal register (hayiti mevakesh "I would ask"), and by the conditional.

Biblical Hebrew, by contrast, used deferential third-person address such as your servant for "I" and my lord for "you" (Kim 2023, Hebrew Forms of Address; local hbobook-2023-kim-hebrew-forms-address). Modern Hebrew dropped the system with the egalitarian ideology of the revival period (10).

9.3 Names, titles and honorifics

First names are the norm in most workplaces, schools (students to teachers, in many schools) and the army among ranks of near level. Surnames alone are used in the army and for public figures (Ben-Gurion, Rabin). Nicknames and clipped names abound: Avi, Yossi, Dudu (David), Moshik (Moshe), Rina'le — the Yiddish diminutive -le and the Hebrew -ik, -tchik, -i (08).

Titles:

In the Knesset proceedings the chair is addressed as adoni ha-yoshev rosh or gvirti ha-yoshévet rosh, and members refer to each other in the third person with titles; the IAHLTknesset treebank shows 228 vocative relations in 2 883 sentences, against 1 in Wikipedia (11).

Kinship terms for non-kin: akhi "my brother" (colloquial, from Arabic usage akhi "my brother"), akhoti "my sister", ába / íma to address one's parents, sába / sávta "grandpa/grandma" for any elderly person. Motek "sweetie" and mami (Mizrahi, warm) are used by strangers in markets.

9.4 Gender in address and inclusive language

Every "you", every verb in the 2nd person, and every adjective and participle agreeing with the hearer is gendered (04, 05). Addressing an unknown or mixed audience forces a choice.

• The masculine plural is the traditional default for mixed groups: atem muzmanim "you (M.PL) are invited".
• Slash forms in writing: mevakshim/ot, ata/at, muzman/et. Official forms and job ads use them; many add the formula "the text is written in the masculine for convenience but is addressed to both genders".
• Dotted forms: muzmanim.ot, studentim.ot — newer, associated with activist and academic writing.
• Alternation and the feminine plural: some writers address mixed groups in the feminine plural, or alternate.
• Inclusive new morphology: proposals such as the Hebrew Nonbinary Language Project (a nonbinary suffix -imot / -eh) have a following in some communities but are not accepted by the Academy and are rare outside them.
• Avoidance: impersonal constructions (efshar le-hirashem "registration is possible"), infinitives on signs (lo le-ashen), and 1st-person plural.

The Academy of the Hebrew Language has published guidance that masculine forms may serve generically, while describing the feminine and double forms as legitimate alternatives (Academy public pages; the exact decision texts should be checked before quoting). For language technology the practical facts are: the same text may come in four spellings of gender, slash forms must be tokenised (the slash is a token in UD), and a model that assumes masculine 2nd person will misgender.

9.5 Requests

Blum-Kulka's work on Hebrew requests, within the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP; Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984; Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989), compared request strategies in Hebrew, English, German, French and other languages. Hebrew speakers used more direct strategies than English speakers in many situations, and the most common indirect strategy was the conventional question of ability or possibility (Blum-Kulka 1982, 1987). Her studies also found that indirectness and politeness are not the same scale: the most indirect strategies (hints) were not judged the most polite.

The repertoire, from most to least direct:

Softeners (downgraders):

• בבקשה bevakasha "please" — at the end or start; also "you're welcome" and "here you are".
• רגע réga "a moment": réga, efshar lishol mashehu? "just a sec, can I ask something?".
• נו nu — urging, not softening: nu, tavi kvar "come on, give it already" (§ 9.10).
• אולי ulay "maybe": ulay tavo gam ata? "maybe you'll come too?".
• קצת ktsat "a little": tazuz ktsat "move a bit".
• diminutive and endearment: motek, tavi li et ze "sweetie, hand me that".
• the conditional hayíti: hayíti mevakesh she-... "I'd ask that…".
• רק rak "just": rak sheela ktana "just a small question".

Formal written requests use the conditional or the passive participle: ha-tsibur mitbakesh lo le-ashen "the public is requested not to smoke"; na le-hakpid al... "please be careful about…" (נא na, an old particle of entreaty, survives only in signs and formal notices: na lo la-ga'at "please do not touch").

9.6 Greetings and partings

Answers to "how are you": beseder "OK", tov "good", sababa "great" (slang), akhla "excellent" (slang), ba-seder gamur "totally fine", barukh ha-shem "thank God" (religious and many traditional speakers; § 9.8), ma lehagid "what can I say", khay "alive" (jocular).

Israeli phone openings are notably brief: halo? or ken? "yes?", and the caller often launches into business without a greeting; endings are short (yála bay).

9.7 Blessings, wishes and formulas of the calendar

Hebrew has a rich stock of fixed wishes, many from the Jewish calendar, used by religious and secular speakers alike:

9.8 Religious formulas in secular mouths

Many formulas with God's name are used by speakers of every degree of observance, with varying literalness (Glinert 1989; Ben-Rafael and Weitman, not held, on tradition in Israeli secularism):

• ברוך השם barukh ha-shem (ב״ה) "blessed be the Name" — "thank God", answering "how are you"; frequent among traditional (masorti) and Mizrahi speakers, also secular ones.
• בעזרת השם be-ezrat ha-shem (בע״ה) "with God's help" — when speaking of plans.
• אם ירצה השם im yirtse ha-shem (אי״ה) "God willing" — like Arabic in shā' allāh.
• בלי נדר bli néder "without a vow" — hedging a promise, from religious law (a promise is not a vow).
• בלי עין הרע bli áyin ha-ra / חמסה khamsa "without the evil eye" — after praise of a child or good fortune, to ward off envy; khamsa is from Arabic, the hand amulet.
• תודה לאל toda la-el "thank God" — more formal.
• חס וחלילה khas ve-khalila / חלילה "God forbid".
• אלוהים אדירים elohim adirim "mighty God" — exclamation of shock.
• שיהיה בשעה טובה, תזכו למצוות — blessings among the observant.

Religious Jews write ב״ה or בס״ד (be-siyata di-shmaya, Aramaic "with Heaven's help") at the top of letters and documents; secular Hebrew does not.

9.9 Thanking, apologising, complimenting

Thanks: toda "thanks", toda raba "thanks a lot", toda be-emet "thank you really", tánks (English, slang), ein al ma "don't mention it" (lit. "there's nothing to (thank) for"), bevakasha "you're welcome". Thanking is less frequent and less elaborate in casual Israeli interaction than in American English; over-thanking can sound formal.

Apologies: slikha "sorry, excuse me" (also to get attention: slikha, éfo ha-takhana? "excuse me, where's the station?"), ani mitstaer / mitstaéret (M/F) "I'm sorry" (more serious), sóri (English, very common); the verb is lehitnatsel "to apologise" and the noun hitnatslut "apology" (ani mitnatsel "I apologise", formal). Apologies were the second speech act of CCSARP (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984; Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989), which compared the strategies (an explicit apology formula, taking responsibility, explanation, offer of repair, promise of forbearance) across languages including Hebrew; the detailed Hebrew figures are in the volume, which is not held here.

Compliments and their answers: kol ha-kavod "well done", yófi "great" (lit. "beauty"), ein kmotkha "there's none like you", ata totakh "you're a cannon" (slang, "you're awesome"); answers often deflect (ma pitom "no way") or attribute luck.

9.10 Discourse markers

Spoken Hebrew is dense with discourse markers; a frame reader must recognise them as non-propositional (UD tags them ADV, INTJ or discourse). Main ones (Maschler 2009, Metalanguage in Interaction: Hebrew Discourse Markers, not held; Ariel 1998 on harey; Henkin 2010 on Arabic loans, not held):

Tag questions: nakhon? "right?", lo? "no?", ken? "yes?", ha? "huh?".

Davka deserves a note: it marks that something happens in a way contrary to expectation or to someone's wish ("He davka came, although we told him not to"; "Why davka me?"); it entered Yiddish and Jewish English and is often cited as untranslatable.

9.11 Interjections and response words

9.12 Swearing and insults

Israeli Hebrew has relatively few native obscenities: the old language had little profanity, and the revivers did not create it. Speakers borrow it — overwhelmingly from Arabic (sexual and family insults), secondarily from Russian (especially among immigrants of the 1990s and their children) and from English (fak, shit). Hebrew-origin curses are mostly mild or archaic (lekh la-azazel "go to Azazel", i.e. to hell; yimakh shmo "may his name be erased", serious). Describing rather than listing: the Arabic-origin expressions concern the hearer's mother or sister and are understood by Hebrew speakers as strong but are used casually among young men; they are not translated literally by speakers who use them.

Mild expressions of annoyance: ufff, ya allah (exasperation), eize sefel "what a drag" (lit. "what a cup", army slang), khaval al ha-zman "a waste of time".

Insults common in politics and the press — frayer (Yiddish/German "sucker", someone who is taken advantage of; to avoid being a frayer is a famous Israeli concern; Roniger and Feige 1992, not held), khnun "nerd", khamor "donkey (idiot)", metumtam "stupid". The Knesset has a list of expressions the chair rules out of order (not held; mentioned in press).

Offensive-language detection for Hebrew is an active NLP topic: Litvak, Vanetik et al. (2022) annotated Hebrew Facebook comments for offensive content and compared cross-lingual learning with Arabic (local: lingbulk-2022-litvak-offensive-language-detection-hebrew-can); Vanetik et al. (2025) built HeDetox, 600 pairs of offensive Hebrew sentences and their non-offensive rewrites (local: aclbulk-2025-vanetik-safer-hebrew-communication-dataset-offensive).

9.13 Irony, teasing and yihye beseder

Irony in written Hebrew is often marked by scare quotes around a single word: ha-"shalom" "the 'peace'". Shmidman, Weizman and Gerczuk (2025) annotated over 4 000 words in quotation marks from Hebrew newspapers as ironic or not and trained BERT-based classifiers; their best configurations reached an F1 around 0.78 using the sentence alone, and adding wider context did not help (local: prag-2025-shmidman-irony-detection-hebrew-documents-novel). Weizman's earlier work on irony and positioning in Hebrew news interviews is a reference point (not held).

Spoken irony uses intonation and certain markers: be-emet? "really?" with falling tone, ken, betakh "yeah, sure", yá'ani "supposedly", ha-gaon "the genius" (sarcastic epithet), and the ironic blessing she-tihyé bari "may you be healthy" ("thanks a lot", or "good luck with that").

Teasing (tsakhok, lirdof) and banter among friends are a mark of intimacy; the soldier's humour (chizbat — tall tales of the Palmach generation) and the dakhka "joke" (army slang from Arabic daḥka "a laugh") are part of the culture.

Yihyé beséder. Israeli self-descriptions include the attitude yihyé beséder "it'll be OK", the improvisational iltur "improvisation" (lit. "on-the-spot"), and smokh "trust me, it'll work out". These are cultural keywords that recur in talk about national character (Katriel 1986, 2004 — not held).

9.14 Conversation: turn-taking, overlap, firgun

• Overlap and interruption are frequent and not necessarily rude: Israeli conversation tolerates simultaneous talk and short gaps, and a listener's overlap can be a sign of involvement (Blum-Kulka 1997, Dinner Talk, not held, comparing Israeli and American Jewish family dinners).
• Backchannels: ken, ken, nakhon, ah, ma at omeret "you don't say" (lit. "what are you saying"), wála.
• Argument as sociability: vikuakh "argument" in family and political talk is a form of engagement (Blum-Kulka 1997; Schiffrin's comparable work on Jewish American "sociable argument").
• Firgun (פירגון, from Yiddish farginen "not to begrudge"): wholehearted, generous praise or support for someone else's success, without envy. Katriel (1993) described it as a counter-ritual to the harshness of dugri: an expression of solidarity. Lefargen "to give firgun" is a verb in pi'el, and lack of firgun is a common complaint.
• Kiturim (קיטורים) "griping": ritual complaining as a shared genre (Katriel 1985).

9.15 Written and spoken registers

The written language is markedly more formal than speech, and the gap is the source of many pragmatic choices:

Knesset speech is a mixed register: formal phrases (adoni ha-yoshev rosh, khaver ha-kenéset ha-nikhbad) beside colloquial syntax. Goldin et al. (2024) built the Knesset Corpus — over 30 million sentences (384 million tokens) from plenary and committee protocols, 1998–2022, with speaker metadata — and used it to show a decline in lexical richness over time and stylistic differences between men and women: in their data women used active verbs more and passive verbs less than men, and overused intensifiers such as "very" and "really" (local: arxivrecent-2024-goldin-knesset-corpus-annotated-corpus-hebrew). Mor-Lan et al. (2025) annotated 5 536 sentences of Israeli politicians' Facebook posts for twelve social identities (HebID) — a resource for how identity is voiced in political Hebrew (local: findings-2025-lan-hebid-detecting-social-identities-hebrew).

9.16 Pragmatics in the grammar

Several grammatical choices are pragmatically loaded:

• Future for imperative. The future (tavi) is the neutral command; the morphological imperative (havé) is sharp, literary or used for short verbs (bo "come", tén "give", shev "sit", lekh "go"). An infinitive command (lashévet!) is impersonal and brusque (05).
• Counterfactual for politeness. Hayíti rotse "I would want" softens; hayíti mamlits "I'd recommend".
• Ethical dative. tishtok li "shut up (for me)", halakh lo "he just went off" — emotive colouring (07 § 7.6).
• Dative of affectedness: ha-mekhonit mitkalkélet li "my car keeps breaking down on me".
• The demonstrative ze as copula and as a dismissive "this thing": ma ze ha-dávar ha-ze? "what is this thing?".
• Left dislocation for contrast and topic (07 § 7.20).
• et with partitives and fronted objects (07 § 7.5).
• First person plural for solidarity: a doctor's eykh anákhnu margishim? "how are we feeling?".

9.17 For a machine reader

What a pragmatics layer for Hebrew (Mova prag; 12) would need from this chapter:

1. A list of formulas (greetings, blessings, thanks, apologies) recognised as whole speech acts, not parsed literally: bóker or is not about light, barukh ha-ba is not about blessing.
2. Discourse markers as non-propositional: yála, nu, ke'ilu, be-étsem, dávka, wála attach to the clause but add no participant.
3. Request detection that treats the 2nd-person future, efshar + INF?, ata yakhol + INF? and tukhal + INF? as requests, not as predictions or questions of ability.
4. Negative concord (07): af ekhad lo ba has one negation, not two.
5. Irony cues: scare quotes, ken, betakh, ya'ani.
6. Gender of the addressee recovered from verb and adjective forms; mixed-gender slash forms read as one word.
7. Religious formulas whose literal content (God) is not the speaker's assertion.

References

Works marked not held are not in the local library; they are cited from their standard descriptions and listed in Sources under «wanted».

• Ariel, Mira. 1998. Discourse markers and form-function correlations. In A. Jucker and Y. Ziv (eds.), Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theory. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Not held. (On harey.)
• Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1982. Learning to say what you mean in a second language: a study of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language. Applied Linguistics 3(1): 29–59. Not held.
• Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1987. Indirectness and politeness in requests: same or different? Journal of Pragmatics 11: 131–146. Not held.
• Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1997. Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Not held.
• Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House and Gabriele Kasper (eds.). 1989. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Not held.
• Blum-Kulka, Shoshana and Elite Olshtain. 1984. Requests and apologies: a cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics 5(3): 196–213. Not held.
• Glinert, Lewis. 1989. The Grammar of Modern Hebrew. Cambridge: CUP. Not held.
• Goldin, Gili, Nick Howell, Noam Ordan, Ella Rabinovich and Shuly Wintner. 2024. The Knesset Corpus: An Annotated Corpus of Hebrew Parliamentary Proceedings. arXiv:2405.18115. Local: arxivrecent-2024-goldin-knesset-corpus-annotated-corpus-hebrew.
• Katriel, Tamar. 1985. "Griping" as a verbal ritual in some Israeli discourse. In M. Dascal (ed.), Dialogue: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Not held.
• Katriel, Tamar. 1986. Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture. Cambridge: CUP. Not held.
• Katriel, Tamar. 1993. Lefargen: a study in Israeli semantics of social relations. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26(1): 31–53. Not held.
• Katriel, Tamar. 2004. Dialogic Moments: From Soul Talks to Talk Radio in Israeli Culture. Detroit: Wayne State UP. Not held.
• Kim, Young Bok. 2023. Hebrew Forms of Address: A Sociolinguistic Analysis. Ancient Near East Monographs. Atlanta: SBL Press (open access). Local: hbobook-2023-kim-hebrew-forms-address.
• Litvak, Marina, Natalia Vanetik, Chaya Liebeskind, Omar Hmdia and Rizek Abu Madeghem. 2022. Offensive language detection in Hebrew: can other languages help? LREC 2022. Local: lingbulk-2022-litvak-offensive-language-detection-hebrew-can.
• Maschler, Yael. 2009. Metalanguage in Interaction: Hebrew Discourse Markers. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Not held.
• Mor-Lan, Guy, Naama Rivlin-Angert, Yael R. Kaplan, Tamir Sheafer and Shaul R. Shenhav. 2025. HebID: Detecting Social Identities in Hebrew-language Political Text. Findings of ACL 2025. Local: findings-2025-lan-hebid-detecting-social-identities-hebrew.
• Roniger, Luis and Michael Feige. 1992. From pioneer to freier: the changing models of generalized exchange in Israel. European Journal of Sociology 33(2). Not held.
• Shmidman, Avi, Elda Weizman and Avishay Gerczuk. 2025. Irony Detection in Hebrew Documents: A Novel Dataset and an Evaluation of Neural Classification Methods. Local: prag-2025-shmidman-irony-detection-hebrew-documents-novel.
• Vanetik, Natalia, Lior Liberov, Marina Litvak and Chaya Liebeskind. 2025. Towards Safer Hebrew Communication: A Dataset for Offensive Language Detoxification. Local: aclbulk-2025-vanetik-safer-hebrew-communication-dataset-offensive.
• Academy of the Hebrew Language, public pages on gender in language and address: hebrew-academy.org.il (decision texts to be checked before quoting).
• Wikipedia (English): "Dugri", "Firgun", "Israeli Hebrew slang" — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugri, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firgun (consulted for orientation; CC BY-SA, not copied).

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