Yemeni Arabic

Yemeni Arabic is a cluster of Arabic varieties spoken in Yemen, southwestern Saudi Arabia, northern Somalia, and Djibouti. It is generally considered a very conservative dialect cluster, as it has many classical features not found across most of the Arabic speaking world.

Yemeni Arabic can be divided roughly into several main dialect groups, each with its own distinctive vocabulary and phonology. The most important of these groups are San'ani, Ta'izzi-Adeni (South Yemeni Arabic or Djibouti Arabic), Tihami and Hadhrami (Hadrami). The independent languages of Mahri (Mehri) and Suqutri (Socotri, Soqotri), as well as a couple of smaller languages, are not Arabic dialects at all, but form a group of its own, confusingly called Modern South Arabian languages, although they are not descended from Old South Arabian (also called Sayhadic). Below is a table showing the transliteration system of some consonants together with their IPA values (Note that some phonetic symbols may not appear in some versions of web browser):