Linguistic purism

He wrote a paper called Realistic Prescriptivism, and his argument is that the Academy's approach is unrealistic because it treats language as something that can be dictated from above.

He distinguishes between purism and something he calls Realistic Prescriptivism.

Purism says the language must be protected from foreign influence, words must be built from native roots, and the Academy is the guardian.

Realistic prescriptivism says language change is inevitable, speakers will do what speakers do, and the best an academy can hope for is to guide the process rather than command it.

Zuckerman is also the guy who coined the term Israeli rather than modern Hebrew, arguing that what Israelis actually speak is a hybrid language, not a pure revival of biblical Hebrew.