How the word דֹוס rolled from the “English of the Ancient Near East” to the Israeli street

Over the years, the word turned from derogatory slang into a label proudly used within the religious community.

How is it possible that a contemporary Israeli slang word, "דוס", grew out of linguistic transformations stretching back thousands of years, and was even re-adopted within the religious community? The word, born as mockery for the religious in the sabra dialect, carries with it ancient traces that lead back to a people long gone — the Arameans — and the way their language influenced Hebrew.

The story begins with the crisis of the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BCE. Great empires collapsed, and in their place new kingdoms arose. In our region, Israel and Judah emerged, and in northern Syria appeared a mosaic of Aramean kingdoms — Aram-Damascus, Arpad, Beth Eden, Shamal, and others.

The relations between Israel and the Arameans were complex: sometimes allies, such as in the Battle of Qarqar where they fought together against the Assyrians, and sometimes bitter enemies, as in the days of Hazael king of Damascus. Eventually, both Israel and the Arameans were conquered by Tiglath-Pileser III, king of Assyria, and the peoples themselves disappeared from history. But while the Kingdom of Israel bequeathed to the world the Jewish religion, the Arameans left behind their language.

Aramaic became the language of administration and bureaucracy in the Assyrian Empire, and later in Babylon and Persia. For centuries it served as the international language — the “English of the Ancient Near East.” Whoever wanted to advance studied it, and whoever mastered it integrated into the structures of power and economy. The Arameans themselves disappeared, but their language remained and left a significant imprint on the region, including on Hebrew.

One of the deepest influences of Aramaic on Hebrew was the development of the בג"ד כפ"ת system, which children still learn about in school today. In Aramaic, a process occurred where six plosive consonants — ב, ג, ד, כ, פ, ת — changed their pronunciation and became fricatives when appearing after a vowel. In linguistics this is called “allophones” — different realizations of the same consonant, depending on its place in the word.

A good example of an allophone is the change in the pronunciation of ש when it appears before ב. In such a case, we pronounce the ש like the French j (for example, the word חשבון). In fast speech, you can notice that we actually pronounce it חֶז'בון.

Since many Hebrew speakers in the Second Temple period were also Aramaic speakers, these unconscious habits seeped into Hebrew too, and each of these six letters had two pronunciations — ב and ּב, ת and ּת, etc. (Modern speakers can usually distinguish only in ב, כ, and פ). In the centuries that followed, Jews stopped speaking Hebrew and assimilated into different communities in Europe and the Middle East, and the rules once known orally began to be written down in the system of vowel marks, in order to preserve the reading tradition.

But in different communities, the distinctions were preserved differently. The Yemenites, for example, maintained the difference between rafe and dagesh in all six consonants. The Sephardim lost the distinction in ת, ג, and ד but kept it in ב, פ, and כ. The Ashkenazim preserved, in addition to those three, also the distinction in ת, with a slight twist: originally ת’ rafe was pronounced like th in the word “thing,” but they pronounced it like s, since German and Yiddish had no such consonant. The result was a distinct pronunciation tradition that over time became a hallmark.

When Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his colleagues revived Hebrew at the end of the 19th century, they sought to fix one pronunciation as the basis for the national language of Zionism. They chose the Sephardic pronunciation, considered closer to ancient Hebrew (an exception was language revivalist Yitzhak Epstein, who decided to abandon distinctions between rafe and dagesh entirely. As a result of his work in Rosh Pina and its surroundings, the Galilean accent without these distinctions appeared).

But spoken Hebrew was not born in a vacuum. Other traditions, especially the Ashkenazi pronunciation, continued to be heard in daily life, particularly from the religious. And so, after 3,000 years of transformations, the word "דוס" was born.

Secular sabras heard their Ashkenazi religious neighbors saying דֹוִסים instead of דתיים — with a kamatz pronounced as an o vowel and a ת’ rafe pronounced as s — and turned this form into a mocking slang nickname. At first it referred specifically to Ashkenazi religious people, but soon it stuck to all observant Jews: Sephardim and Yemenites, Litvaks and Hasidim alike.

Over time, as sometimes happens with stinging nicknames, the word was adopted by some religious people themselves and turned into a marker of identity and even pride. For example, a well-known gossip page on TikTok and Instagram is called "דוסלבס", “וידויים של דוסים” is a popular group for venting thoughts, and "דוסקאסט" is a podcast library for the religious community, which among other things offers the podcast "דיגידוס".