The war of languages was a debate in Ottoman Palestine revolving around the language of instruction in the country's new Jewish schools. This "language war" was a cornerstone event in the history of the revival of the Hebrew language.

In 1913, the German Jewish aid agency Deutscher Juden declared that the official language in the first technical high school established in Palestine would be German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

. This sparked a public outcry between those who supported the use of German and those who believed that Hebrew should be the language spoken by the Jewish people in their homeland. The issue was not just ideological: Until then, Hebrew was primarily a liturgical language and lacked modern technical terms.