Is hebrew a real language?

You are correct that Hebrew was a dead language for centuries, until it was successfully revived upon the foundation of the state of Israel.

Hebrew was preserved over the centuries as the liturgical language of Judaism, so many Jewish scholars and students of the Torah in the Jewish diaspora were quite capable of speaking it. However, many Orthodox Jews believe that the Hebrew language is too sacred to use as a means of day-to-day communication. In many Jewish communities, special "Jewish" forms of the local language (the two best known of these are Yiddish, and Ladino) were used to communicate within the group. Since Hebrew was reserved specifically for worship, it was considered to be extinct.

At the end of the 19th century, many Jewish scholars begin working to create a lexically modern version of the Hebrew language, for use in a potential Jewish state. When Israel was founded, this created the perfect venue for the new modern Hebrew language that these men had created.

Edit: allow me to clarify that a language is not "dead" because it isn't used in daily communication, or because it doesn't have any native speakers. Languages are classified as extinct when they cease to evolve-- and this usually happens when the last native speakers die. Liturgical languages are always very heavily codified, meaning that their grammars and lexicon are already set in stone, so to speak. This means that they are highly unlikely to undergo any significant changes.

Some people distinguish modern Hebrew as "Israeli", as it is a distinct language from Biblical Hebrew (in the exact same way Modern and Biblical Greek are distinct) but it is a living language with a large number of speakers.

Biblical Hebrew could be called 'Dead' because it has no population of native speakers, but like any liturgical language that is in constant use by a religion (for example, Ecclesiastical Latin or Syriac), the term "Dead" is a little misleading. How can a language which is spoken in worship services weekly all over the world actually be 'dead'?

Hebrew (עִבְרִית, Ivrit, Hebrew pronunciation (help·info)) is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages that originated among diaspora Jews exist. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by most of the seven million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world for over two thousand years. It is one of the official languages of Israel, along with Arabic. Ancient Hebrew is also the liturgical tongue of the Samaritans, while modern Hebrew or Palestinian Arabic is their vernacular, though today about 700 Samaritans remain. As a foreign language it is studied mostly by Jews and students of Judaism and Israel, archaeologists and linguists specializing in the Middle East and its civilizations, by theologians, and in Christian seminaries.

The core of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), and most of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, is written in Classical Hebrew, and much of its present form is specifically the dialect of Biblical Hebrew that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BC, around the time of the Babylonian exile. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Leshon HaKodesh (לשון הקודש), "The Holy Language", since ancient times.

The modern word "Hebrew" is derived from the word "ivri" (plural "ivrim") one of several names for the Jewish people. It is traditionally understood to be an adjective based on the name of Abraham's ancestor, Eber ("ever" עבר in Hebrew) mentioned in Genesis 10:21. This name is possibly based upon the root "`avar" (עבר) meaning "to cross over" and homiletical interpretations of the term "ivrim" link it to this verb. In the Bible, "Hebrew" is called Yehudith (יהודית) because Judah (Yehuda) was the surviving kingdom at the time of the quotation, late 8th century BCE (Is 36, 2 Kings 18). In Isaiah 19:18, it is also called the "Language of Canaan" (שְׂפַת כְּנַעַן).

i could leave Coptic thoroughly out as that doesn't happen till after Greek is particularly used (it rather is Egyptian utilising Greek letters and shows up a pair thousand years after Moses) and could be be impossible to be attentive to in the previous it existed. center Egyptian and Moabite/Hebrew (functionally dialects of an identical Semitic language) are important contenders.

Hebrew was never a dead language. It's always been in use by the Jewish people.

Yeah people still speak it not as much as in the past, but some people still do speak it. It's a Jewish language so people in Jerusalem speak it often.

This is a great question, and one that has been confusing me for many years.

yea

its real, i have friends that are studying it