Dialects
Hijaz dialect
ˀAzd dialect
The ˀAzd dialect is rarely mentioned in the literature. Whereas anecdotes and šawāhid from other Yemeni dialects are given, the dialect of ˀAzd receives little attention. More confusing still is the fact that there were two tribes by the name of ˀAzd, one in Oman and the other in the western part of Yemen. The two features that are mentioned, however, show the difference between this dialect and the rest of Yemen. # The retention of the nominal case endings a, i, and u in the pausal position. # The retention of the vowel a in the prefixes of the imperfect, e.g. yaktub ‘he writes’ as against the taltala in other dialects.Huḏayl dialect
The tribe of Huḏayl was situated in the southeastern part of the Hijaz, to the north of Yemen and to the northeast of ˀAzd. Its location in the southeast of the Hijaz connected this tribe geographically to the Eastern dialect group, which earned the tribe its fame for speaking wellformed Arabic. Despite this connection with the east, the dialect of Huḏayl belonged mainly to the Western group and functioned as an intermediate zone between the Hijaz and northern Yemen (Rabin 1951:79). The evidence for this claim comes from the grammatical and lexical features it shared with the Western group. They shared, for instance, ˀawwàb ‘obedient’ and jadaṯ ‘tomb’ with Kināna. Other features mentioned by the grammarians include: # The insertion of short unstressed vowels in the middle of words, e.g. ibin ‘son’ instead of Classical Arabic ibn, and jawazàt ‘nuts’, sg. jawza. In Classical Arabic, words with a singular pattern faˁla receive an anaptyctic vowel a in the feminine plural, to become faˁalāt. This vowel is not added when the second radical in the root is w or y, but Huḏayl added an anaptyctic vowel to roots containing w and y as well. # The absence of vowel harmony. # The absence of the hamza. # It is probable that in Huḏayl the final long vowels were shortened, as was the case in the Hijaz. # The change of the glides wu and wi into the long vowels ù and ì, respectively. # Huḏayl used the relative pronoun allaḏī. The plural of this pronoun was allaḏūna, in all numbers and genders, in opposition to Classical Arabic, which uses allaḏīna. # Concerning the taltala feature, Huḏayl was claimed to have used both forms: -a- imperfect like the Hijaz dialects, and -i imperfect like the eastern tribes. This variation is also common in Ṭayyiˀ. Both tribes had contact with eastern tribes, which may explain the variation.Ṭayyiˀ dialect
The Ṭayyiˀ tribe was situated in the north of the Najd. It occupied the southern frontiers of the Nufùd desert and was also situated toward the northeast of the Hijaz region. It shared with the tribes of the eastern part some linguistic features, such as the taltala. Rabin (1951:193) claims that such common features are suggestive of the connecting role this tribe played between the dialects of the eastern and western parts of the peninsula. The territory of Ṭayyiˀ during the early Islamic period was not the original habitat of the tribe. The tribe was traditionally known to have migrated from northern Yemen together with the tribes with which it shared some linguistic features. Features of this dialect include: # The weakening of the final syllable and elision of final nasals, laterals, t, and/or y. # The absence of vowel harmony and vowel elision. # The change of /ˁ/ into /ˀ/, e.g. daˀ-nī ‘let me’; no other data about depharyngealization are available. # The fate of hamza in this dialect is not known due to the absence of direct evidence. # The suffix pronoun of the 3rd person feminine in pause was -ah and -hā in context, which is in accordance with the Classical and Eastern Arabic weakening of final syllables. # The form of the article was am-. # The singular feminine demonstrative was tā, not hāḏihi. # The relative pronoun was ḏū, which was used for the two genders and all numbers. # The -t of the feminine plural was dropped in pause; again, this is in harmony with the weakening of final syllables. # az-Zajjaji (Šarh 152) claims that as in the Hijaz, the predicate of verbal sentences agreed in number with the head verb.Yemeni Arabic
The dialect of Yemen was very well represented in the writings of the grammarians because of the special interest it held for the scholars of the 3rd and 4th centuries A.H., especially for lexicographers like Ibn Durayd (d. 321/933) and Našwàn (d. 573/1178). Although home to a host of South Arabian dialects, Yemen does not reflect much South Arabian influence, except for some lexical items that may be mere loanwords from that language. A good example is the word baˁl ‘lord’, which is still common in Mehri (Rabin 1951:25–27). During the time of al-Hamadànì (d. after 360/971), the main source on Yemen, a dialect similar to the Central Arabian Bedouin dialects was spoken in the region east of Saràt and in the extreme south. Al-Hamadànì describes these dialects as ‘correct’ Arabic. In the central and western regions of the Saràt, different dialects were spoken. These dialects are characterized by al-Hamadànì as mutawassi† ‘middle’. Rabin (1951:45) claims that this attribute must mean that they were mixtures of Arabic and Himyaritic. In the southern part of Saràt and the mountains around Sanˁàˀ, the language showed strong traces of Himyaritic. In the area to the west, a mixture of Arabic and Himyaritic was spoken. In the villages, however, Himyaritic was predominant. Outside the villages, in the nomadic areas, West Arabian dialects were spoken (Rabin 1951:45). Thus, there were two linguistic communities in Yemen, apart from the Bedouin in the east. The first was that of the settled farmer groups, which spoke a mixture of Himyaritic and Arabic, while the other group consisted of the nomadic people who spoke West Arabian dialects. Although the Yemeni dialects spoken in this region were very similar to other Arabic dialects, Arabs considered them incomprehensible. There are several anecdotes in the literature showing that Arabs did not consider the dialects of Himyar Arabic to be similar to their own. The attribute ṭumṭumàniyya was given in the literature to the Himyaritic dialect as a form of mockery. The northern Yemen region hosted tribes speaking dialects so similar to each other that they could be considered a defined group. This group was different from the rest of Yemen in the south and Huḏayl and the Hijàz in the north. Despite being distinct from both groups, the dialects of northern Yemen exhibited similarities with both. Rabin (1951:64) claims that because grammarians often ascribed Hijazì dialect features to Kinàna, this region can be considered as an extension to the West Arabian dialect group. Among the tribes that lived in this region were Kinàna, Xaṯˁam, Hamadàn, ˁAnbar, Zubayd, and Muràd. The first four of these tribes are frequently mentioned in literature, but whenever a feature is mentioned as belonging to a certain tribe, it may have applied to the rest of the tribes as well. Rabin (1951:64) also assumes that whenever the grammarians mention the tribes of Yemen, they mean these tribes living in the northern part. Among the features mentioned for these dialects are the following: # The absence of ˀimàla. Al-Hamadànì, however, states that the Bedouin tribe of Banù Harb in the south realized ˀimāla. # The realization of hamza. However, in some cases the original hamza of the word was changed into the glide w. An example is ±àtaytu/wàtaytu ‘I obeyed’. This feature is still heard in some modern dialects. # In some Yemenite dialects, the feminine ending -at was generalized to pause positions. Yemenite dialect words may have received tanwìn even in the pause position. # The definite article of the Yemenite dialect was am-. Unlike the Arabic definite article al-, it was not assimilated to dental and sibilant consonants. Words that received this article could also be given tanwìn. An example is found in al-Firuzabadì’s Muḥìṭ (I, 37): mani m-qàˀimun ‘who is standing?’ # The dual suffix in northern Yemen, -àni, was suffixed to the noun. Although other tribes in the peninsula used a single dual ending as well, they coupled it with a different treatment of the final short vowel. They either used -àna as a fixed form or inflected the ending. This feature was ascribed to Dabba in the northwest of the Empty Quarter, which shows that this feature cut across dialect boundaries. # There was a sentence-initial particle ±am that was used with the verb in the imperfect (Rabin 1951:37). vii. In southern Yemen, especially in ðufàr, the demonstrative pronoun for both genders was ḏì, which followed the noun it modified, e.g. iš-šuÿl ḏì ‘this work’ (Rabin 1951:75). # The relative pronoun was ḏì, without distinction for gender or number. It was used in western Ḥaḍramawt and elsewhere. In other places of Yemen and as far north as Huḏayl, the Classical Arabic pronoun allaḏì was used, but without distinction for number or gender. # The negative particle was dù. Another form, still used in Taˁizz, in the southernmost part of Yemen, is da±. This particle may stem from £imyaritic, since a particle da± was found in some of the South Arabian inscriptions around the middle of the 6th century C.E. # The suffix of the 1st and 2nd persons of the verb in the perfect is -k, not -t. A good example is the saying of a woman: raˀayku bi-ḥulm kawaladku ibnan min ṭìb ‘I saw in a dream that I gave birth to a son of gold’. The verbs raˀayku ‘I saw’ and waladku ‘I gave birth’ end in this suffix. The same use is still current in the Yemeni countrysideReferences
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