Huh. I've been listening to the Streetwise Hebrew podcast for a couple of years, which does snippets on actual contemporary Hebrew usage. It's often very different from the Hebrew I learned in school, which was practically Ben Yehuda purist, I suspect. And this post makes me really want to see an analysis of the changes in Hebrew since the late 19th century. I wonder how actual spoken Hebrew has changed with the politics of Hebrew, which for 150 years have been tied to the politics of Zionism. My understanding is that Hebrew was alway more right wing than Yiddish -- does that go along with your research? The socialists and anarchists (including some Zionists) used Yiddish, and the right wing and nationalists (including some Zionists) spoke Hebrew, and both of them were awful to the Jews who spoke Arabic.