Challenging Folk-Linguistics: Grammatical and Spelling Variation in Students' Writing in Hebrew on WhatsApp and in Essays.

This article investigates whether nonstandard linguistic forms typical of spoken Hebrew and digital communication appear in the formal writing of Israeli high-school students. Comparing two corpora—7,120 WhatsApp messages and 291 school essays—the study finds a clear distinction between informal digital writing, which frequently includes nonstandard grammatical forms and creative spelling variations, and formal essays, where adherence to standard Hebrew grammar is largely maintained. Despite an increase over time in nonstandard forms within digital messages, these do not significantly transfer into formal school writing, suggesting that students effectively shift registers according to context. The findings challenge public concerns that digital communication harms literacy in Modern Hebrew, highlighting the role of sociolinguistic and ideological factors in preserving formal language standards.