A WhatsApp Thread, Annotated

Chat Hebrew is not sloppy speech written down. It is a third written register, sitting alongside the spoken and the formal-written ones, with conventions of its own — and this page walks through one thread and names them.

The thread below is invented — written for this page. A real person's messages are protected expression and personal data at the same time, and the screenshots of Israeli chats that circulate online are not licensed for reuse. Maya and Tomer are not anybody.

The thread

The future doing the work of an imperative

תגיד in message 3 is not "you will say". It is the 2nd-person future used as a command, and in Israeli Hebrew that is the ordinary way to tell someone to do something — the true imperative, אמור, belongs to formal, literary and military Hebrew and to frozen labels like דחוף on a door. Here it has drifted further still: תגיד at the head of a message is barely an instruction at all, more like English listen or tell me.

The two things to get right are both agreement:

• Gender and number are carried by the verb. תגיד to a man, תגידי to a woman, תגידו to a group. Get this wrong and you have addressed the wrong person, which no context repairs.
• The pronoun goes. A plain instruction is never אתה תגיד. The prefix ת־ plus the ending already says who you are talking to, so putting the pronoun back makes it emphatic — "you say it, not him".

The negative works the same way with אל: אל תשכח in message 13, אל תשכחי to a woman. לא plus the future is not the everyday prohibition — לא תשכח reads as a prediction, "you won't forget". (It is a prohibition in one register only, the legal-Biblical one that gives us לא תגנוב "thou shalt not steal", which is exactly why it cannot be used to tell a friend to bring sunscreen.) All of this is set out on the future as an imperative.

בוא נלך — Hebrew's "let's"

Message 5 has בוא נלך לים and message 14 has בואי נדבר. The construction is two verbs: בוא (or בואי, בואו) followed by the first-person plural future.

The בוא part agrees with the person you are speaking to; the second verb is always נ־, first-person plural, because the proposal includes you both. English let's has no such split, so learners either inflect the wrong half or leave בוא out entirely. Dropping it is not wrong — plain נלך לים is a perfectly good suggestion — but it is blunter. See saying "let's".

Who is the subject? The present tense is the interesting case

Hebrew past and future verbs carry person in their endings, so the pronoun is genuinely redundant and speakers drop it freely. The present tense does not — the participle marks only gender and number, so אני מגיע and הוא מגיע differ by the pronoun alone. Standard Hebrew therefore keeps it.

Chat breaks that rule constantly, and messages 12 and 13 show exactly how it gets away with it:

• Tomer: מביא מגבת? — "shall I bring a towel?"
• Maya: מביאה. — "I'm bringing one."

Neither has a subject. What supplies it is not the verb but the thread: each person is obviously talking about themselves, and Maya's feminine ending מביאה confirms she means herself rather than agreeing about Tomer. The gender that the participle does mark ends up doing the pronoun's job. Message 8, מגיע באוטובוס, works the same way — Tomer named himself in the previous clause.

The same message in three registers

Take Tomer's message 8 — אוקיי, אבל אני בלי אוטו היום. מגיע באוטובוס. Here it is twice more, moving up the register ladder. Nothing about the content changes; everything about the grammar does.

Three things move together up that ladder, and they always do: the vocabulary (אוטו, רכב), the possession strategy (בלי, אין לי, ברשותי with a bound suffix), and the connective (nothing, אז, ולכן). Learn to move all three at once and your Hebrew stops sounding like one register wearing another's clothes. See spoken vs written Hebrew and texting.

The orthography of chat

Six conventions of written chat are worth naming, five of them visible in this thread.

No niqqud, ever. That is true of nearly all Hebrew, but chat leans on it hardest, and the reader absorbs the ambiguity at speed. Message 11 opens with בטח — here bétakh, "sure", but the identical three letters are also batákh, "he trusted". Nothing on the screen tells them apart; the thread does.

No final punctuation. Several messages end with no full stop at all. The message boundary is the punctuation; adding a period can read as curt.

חחח for laughter. Built on ח — Hebrew's hahaha — and written at any length, from חח to a screenful, exactly as English stretches haha. Romanized in this guide's scheme with kh, never ch: the letters ח and fricative כ are kh throughout, and ch is reserved for צ׳, which is the ch of "church".

ת׳ for the fused את ה־. In message 13, ת׳קרם is את הקרם with the object marker and the article run together into a single ta-. It is real grammar, not a dropped word — the t you can hear is את. Israelis write it this way in messages and in dialogue in novels. In anything more formal it goes back to את ה. See spoken reductions.

Loans written in Hebrew letters. Chat is thick with them, and they do not all come from English: אוקיי does, but סבבה and its neighbours אחלה and יאללה are from Arabic, and תכל׳ס in message 10 is from Yiddish takhles (itself Hebrew תכלית, "purpose"). Whatever the source, the loan is naturalised — Hebrew script, Hebrew inflection where the word allows it, and no italics or scare quotes. תכל׳ס carries a real geresh ׳ (U+05F3) marking the clipped word, though chat drops the mark as often as not (תכלס). The Arabic layer is on Arabic loans; loans that stay in Latin letters are a different phenomenon, handled on code-switching.

The slash-gender form. Not in this two-person thread, because Maya and Tomer know who they are talking to — but the moment a message goes to a group whose gender is mixed or unknown, chat writes both endings at once: מי בא/ה? "who's coming?", מעוניין/ת "interested?". The slash attaches to the masculine stem and adds only what the feminine needs. It is the same device that runs Israeli job advertisements, where it is how an employer satisfies the statutory requirement to word the offer in both genders — see a job advertisement and gender-inclusive writing.

Common Mistakes

1. Getting the gender wrong on the future-as-imperative. The verb, not the pronoun, is what addresses your reader — so a mismatch is not a small slip.

2. Putting את in front of an indefinite object. English has no object marker at all, so learners who have finally noticed את start using it everywhere.

3. Confusing בוא + נ־ with בוא + infinitive. Both are correct Hebrew and they say different things.

4. Assuming the שלי possessive is the "wrong" one. Message 11 has שהחומוס שלו, not a bound suffix. Both exist, and the choice is register, not correctness.

Key Takeaways

• Chat Hebrew is a third written register, with conventions as fixed as those of a formal letter — not degraded speech.
• The 2nd-person future is the everyday imperative (תגיד, תגידי, תגידו), the pronoun is dropped, and the negative is אל, never לא.
• בוא / בואי / בואו agrees with the person you are addressing; the verb after it is always first-person plural future. That split is what English let's hides.
• Past and future verbs license subject-dropping because they carry person. The present does not — chat drops it anyway, and the participle's gender takes over the pronoun's job. Put the pronoun back the moment the thread is not there to supply it.
• Moving up a register moves three things together: vocabulary (אוטו óto becomes רכב rékhev), possession (בלי bli, then אין לי ein li, then ברשותי birshutí), and connective (nothing, then אז az, then ולכן velakhén).
• Chat orthography: no niqqud, often no final punctuation, חחח for laughter (romanized kh, never ch), ת׳ for the fused את ה־, loans naturalised into Hebrew letters (אוקיי, סבבה), and slash-gender forms (בא/ה) for a mixed or unknown addressee.
• תכל׳ס carries a geresh ׳ (U+05F3), not an ASCII apostrophe — and chat drops the mark as often as it keeps it (תכלס).