Yāfiʿī Arabic is a group of closely related Arabic dialects spoken in the
Yāfiʿ district of the
Lahij governate in Yemen, in the historical territories of the sheikhdoms of Upper (''al-ʿUlyā'') and Lower (''al-Suflā'')
Yāfiʿ.
[Vanhove, Martine. "NOTES ON THE ARABIC DIALECTAL AREA OF YĀFIʿ (YEMEN)." Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, vol. 25, 1995, pp. 141–52, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41223556. Accessed 22 Apr. 2022.] Unlike most neighboring dialects the varieties of Yāfiʿ belong to the so-called "''k-dialect''" grouping, meaning that the second person perfect suffixes retain the /-k/ found in the
Sayhadic,
Afrosemitic, and
Modern South Arabian
The Modern South Arabian languages, also known as Eastern South Semitic languages, are a group of endangered languages spoken by small populations inhabiting the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen and Oman, and Socotra Island. Together with the Ethiosem ...
languages as opposed to the /-t/ found in most Arabic dialects. Before the 1990's the dialects of historical Upper and Lower Yāfiʿ had not been described and thus a number if their features that are seen as distinct from neighboring varieties had been overlooked by previous surveys.
Phonology
One of the most notable features of the Yāfiʿī dialects is that the phonemes ''ġ'' and ''q'' are seemingly in free variation with realizations as /ɣ/, /q/, and /ʁ/ become common in words with both phonemes outside of the village of Jabal Yazīdī. The sound ''ġ'' has a fourth realization where primarily older speakers pronounce it as /ʔ/, whilst the younger generation stigmatizes this realization.
The village of Jabal Yazid on the other hand has a dialect which merges ''ġ'' with the voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/ thus resulting in forms such as /ʕalˤiː/ he boiled''
' (*ɣalaː in
Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic () is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notably in Umayyad Caliphate, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate, Abbasid literary texts such as poetry, e ...
). This sound change is also seen in the neighboring dialects of Daṯīnah and Upper ʿAwlaqī, and in other
Semitic languages such as the Modern South Arabian language
Soqotri and Pre-Modern Hebrew. In the dialect of al-Mufliḥī and the village of Rusud the
voiced pharyngeal fricative
The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\. Epiglot ...
/ʕ/ tends to be weakened to a
glottal stop
The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...
primarily in the speech of younger men, resulting in forms such as
əsəni''
'cat'
'' (
usniːin Yiharr). In al-Mufliḥī the weakening of /ʕ/ to /ʔ/ only occurs word-finally.
Like many other speech varieties in southwestern Arabia the Yāfiʿī dialects maintain a distinction between reflexes of Classical Arabic *ɮˤ and *ðˤ, which are realized as
̪ˤand
ˤrespectively.
Alongside neighboring dialect groupings, the dialects of Yāfiʿ
monophthongize the Classical Arabic diphthongs *aj and *aw resulting in the long vowels
ːand
ːsuch as in ''
'bull'
'' and ''
'house. Similarly the feminine ending *-at experiences
imāla
(also ; ) is a phenomenon in Arabic comprising the fronting and raising of Old Arabic toward or , and the old short toward . and the factors conditioning its occurrence were described for the first time by Sibawayh. According to as-Sirafi a ...
of the first degree, meaning that the original /a/ of the ending has become /e/ in these dialects although this seems to be more systematically gender based in the dialect of al-Mufliḥī where male speakers tend to retain the /a/ whilst female speakers have the imāla in their speech.
Grammar
The Yāfiʿī dialects exhibit a rather interesting feature possibly retained from the
Sayhadic language
Qatabanic, which is the presence of a verbal prefix /b-/ in imperfect verbs, although unlike Qatabanic these prefixes are obligatory unless the verb in question is a verb of
modality
Modality may refer to:
Humanities
* Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations
* Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales
* Modalit ...
.
While in Yāfiʿī it appears that modality is the exception to the presence of the prefix, the presence or lack thereof of the prefixed *b- in Qatabanic can't be surmised to be due to an opposition in regards to modality.
[Alessandra Avanzini, Origin and Classification of the Ancient South Arabian Languages, Journal of Semitic Studies, Volume 54, Issue 1, Spring 2009, Pages 205–220, ] In the dialect of al-Mufliḥī this feature is stigmatized and not usually used by younger speakers, particularly young men who have been educated in school. The variety used in the village of Rusud seems to be characterized by a lack of this feature. In the village of Jabal Yazīdī the future imperfect takes the prefix /ʔaː-/ as opposed to the prefix /bæ-/~/bə-/ used on past and present tense imperfect verbs. A similar phenomenon exists in the Arabic dialects of Syria. The imperfect verb conjugation for the variety of Jabal Yazīdī, a variety of the al-Hedd dialect, is as follows:
Most of the Yāfiʿī dialects level the 3rd person feminine suffix *-at to /-ah/, although in the village of Rusud it is more commonly
ət
References
{{reflist
Peninsular Arabic
Languages of Yemen