Bareqi Arabic ( ar, لهجة بارقية) is one of the five major

varieties of Arabic The varieties (or dialects or vernacular languages) of Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family originating in the Arabian Peninsula, are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. There are considerable vari ...

spoken in

Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and has a land area of about , making it the fifth-largest country in Asia, the second-largest in the Ara ...

. It is spoken in many towns and villages in and around

Bareq Bareq ( ar, بارق; also transliterated as '), is one of the governorates of Asir in the north-west of the region, north of Abha. It occupies a distinct location midway between Tihama and Asir, above sea level. With an estimated popul ...

Characteristics

Bareqi Arabic has many aspects that differentiate it from all other dialects in the Arab world. Phonologically, Bareqi Arabic is similar to the majority of Saudi Arabia dialects and

Himyaritic language Himyaritic is an unattested or sparsely attested Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Yemen, by the Himyarite tribal confederacy. It was a Semitic language but either did not belong to the Old South Arabian (''Sayhadic'') languages acco ...

. All Bareqi dialects also share the unusual feature of replacing the definite article ''al-'' with the prefix ''am-''. The dialects of many towns and villages in the wadi and the coastal region are characterized by having changed ج () to a

palatal approximant The voiced palatal approximant, or yod, is a type of consonant used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is j, and in the Americanist phonetic n ...

ي (called yodization).

References

*''The information in this article is based on that in its Arabic equivalent''. {{authority control Arabic languages Arabs in Saudi Arabia Mashriqi Arabic Peninsular Arabic Languages of Saudi Arabia