diff --git a/spacy/tests/serialize/test_serialize_tokenizer.py b/spacy/tests/serialize/test_serialize_tokenizer.py
index cbe119225..bd6b15dc4 100644
--- a/spacy/tests/serialize/test_serialize_tokenizer.py
+++ b/spacy/tests/serialize/test_serialize_tokenizer.py
@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 from __future__ import unicode_literals
 
 import pytest
+import re
 from spacy.util import get_lang_class
 from spacy.tokenizer import Tokenizer
 
@@ -22,6 +23,17 @@ def test_serialize_custom_tokenizer(en_vocab, en_tokenizer):
     tokenizer_bytes = tokenizer.to_bytes()
     Tokenizer(en_vocab).from_bytes(tokenizer_bytes)
 
+    # test that empty/unset values are set correctly on deserialization
+    tokenizer = get_lang_class("en").Defaults.create_tokenizer()
+    tokenizer.token_match = re.compile("test").match
+    assert tokenizer.rules != {}
+    assert tokenizer.token_match is not None
+    assert tokenizer.url_match is not None
+    tokenizer.from_bytes(tokenizer_bytes)
+    assert tokenizer.rules == {}
+    assert tokenizer.token_match is None
+    assert tokenizer.url_match is None
+
     tokenizer = Tokenizer(en_vocab, rules={"ABC.": [{"ORTH": "ABC"}, {"ORTH": "."}]})
     tokenizer.rules = {}
     tokenizer_bytes = tokenizer.to_bytes()
diff --git a/spacy/tokenizer.pyx b/spacy/tokenizer.pyx
index 154a42c4f..bdc9e5f3d 100644
--- a/spacy/tokenizer.pyx
+++ b/spacy/tokenizer.pyx
@@ -608,10 +608,16 @@ cdef class Tokenizer:
             self.suffix_search = re.compile(data["suffix_search"]).search
         if "infix_finditer" in data and isinstance(data["infix_finditer"], basestring_):
             self.infix_finditer = re.compile(data["infix_finditer"]).finditer
+        # for token_match and url_match, set to None to override the language
+        # defaults if no regex is provided
         if "token_match" in data and isinstance(data["token_match"], basestring_):
             self.token_match = re.compile(data["token_match"]).match
+        else:
+            self.token_match = None
         if "url_match" in data and isinstance(data["url_match"], basestring_):
             self.url_match = re.compile(data["url_match"]).match
+        else:
+            self.url_match = None
         if "rules" in data and isinstance(data["rules"], dict):
             # make sure to hard reset the cache to remove data from the default exceptions
             self._rules = {}