A dead language came back to life as a mother tongue - only once

For nearly 2,000 years Hebrew survived only for prayer and scripture. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, driven by 19th-century Jewish nationalism, pushed to make it a spoken vernacular again, raising his own son as its first native speaker in centuries and coining hundreds of modern words. Within a few generations it became a mother tongue of millions - the only fully successful revival of a language with no living native speakers.

— Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution — University of California Press, 1993
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