Italian Hebrew or Italki Hebrew refers to the pronunciation system for liturgical Hebrew traditionally used by Italian Jews. Italian Hebrew are mainly used in religious, literary and academic contexts. They are formed by regional dialects, interactions with local Italian dialects and evolving grammatical conventions.

This article covers the following aspects of Italian Hebrew: features, the differences in pronunciation between the east and west, morphological changes, NP-strategy, the gradual rise of Europe, religious uses, the rise and status of Renaissance studies.

The Italian pronunciation of Hebrew is similar to that of conservative Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Distinguishing features are:

This pronunciation has in many cases been adopted by the Sephardi, Ashkenazi and Appam communities of Italy as well as by the Italian rite communities.

In the context of modern Hebrew, there are two main dialects: Eastern and non-Eastern. The two dialects show significant differences in the use of consonants. Eastern dialects retain some of the pronunciation features of ancient Hebrew, such as the guttural stop /h/. This makes the pronunciation shorter, and Eastern dialect speakers, especially in religious ceremonies, intentionally pronounce certain consonants, such as /s/, /t/, /l/, in guttural forms that non-Eastern dialects do not have.

At the same time, the pronunciation of non-Eastern dialects is more modern, with European influences. For example, the auxiliary middle vowel /e/ in non-Eastern dialects is sometimes changed to [ei], while Eastern dialect speakers tend to retain the monophonic [e] sound. Eastern dialect speakers are more conservative in their use of consonant junctions than non-Eastern dialect speakers, especially in cautious and slow speech. In addition, /r/ in Eastern dialects is usually pronounced as a gingival trill [r], while /r/ in non-Eastern dialects is usually pronounced as a uvula [R].

The pronunciation of Hebrew is markedly different from English, especially in the use of vowels and consonants. Hebrew has only five basic vowel phonemes /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/ and no vowel harmony. Some consonants in Hebrew, such as /x/ and uvula /r/, are not found in English and are pronounced in a position and manner that is markedly different from their English equivalents. Although Hebrew has fewer vowels than English, the pronunciation of certain vowels is slightly but significantly different from that of English vowels.

Compared to languages such as Spanish and French, Hebrew nouns have relatively complex morphological changes, requiring distinction between gender, number and case, etc., while verbs need to agree with the subject in number, gender, person and tense. This makes verbs more complex than nouns. Many morphological change rules lack obvious phonetic cues, and the pronunciation of affixes depends on the root of the word that follows them.