a guttural , reflecting their dialect of Arabic. An apparently unrelated uvular rhotic is believed to have appeared in the Tiberian vocalization of Hebrew, where it is believed to have coexisted with additional non-guttural, emphatic articulations of depending on circumstances. Yiddish influence Although an Ashkenazi Jew in the Russian Empire, the Zionist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda based his Standard Hebrew on Sephardi Hebrew, originally spoken in Spain, and therefore recommended an alveolar . However, just like him, the first waves of Jews to resettle in the Holy Land were Ashkenazi, and Standard Hebrew would come to be spoken with their native pronunciation. Consequently, by now nearly all Israeli Jews pronounce the consonant rêš () as a uvular approximant , specifically , which also exists in Yiddish. The alveolar rhotic is still used today in some formal speech, such as radio news broadcasts, and in the past was widely used in television and singing. Sephardic Hebrew Many Jewish immigrants to Israel spoke a variety of Arabic in their countries of origin and pronounced the Hebrew rhotic as an alveolar flap , similar to Arabic (). Gradually, many of them began pronouncing their Hebrew rhotic as a voiced uvular fricative , a sound similar or (depending on the Arabic dialect) identical to Arabic (). However, in modern Sephardic and Mizrahi poetry and folk music an alveolar rhotic continues to be used. Arabic While most dialects of Arabic retain the classical pronunciation of () as an alveolar trill or flap , a few dialects use a uvular trill . These include: pre-modern Baghdadi Arabic. The Tigris dialects, a group among the Mesopotamian Arabic in Iraq, for instance in Mosul The Jewish and Christian dialects in Baghdad The Jewish dialect in Algiers The dialect of Jijel in Algeria Some Muslim-urban dialects of Morocco (e.g. in Fes) Some Jewish dialects in Morocco. The uvular was attested already in vernacular Arabic of the Abbasid period. Nowadays Christian Arabic of Baghdad exhibits also an alveolar trill in very few lexemes, but primarily used in loanwords from Modern Standard Arabic. Native words with an alveolar trill are rare. Moreover, Mosul Arabic commonly has the voiced alveolar trill instead of a uvular fricative in numbers (e.g. "forty"). Although this guttural rhotic is rare in Arabic, uvular and velar sounds are common in this language. The uvular or velar fricative ~ is a common standard pronunciation of the letter (), and the