Concept
Yemeni Arabic is a cluster of varieties of Arabic spoken in Yemen and southwestern Saudi Arabia. It is generally considered a very conservative dialect cluster, having 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 four groups are San'ani in the North and Center and Hadhrami in the East, where is pronounced g and is d͡ʒ or ɟ (except in coastal Hadhrami where is j), in addition to Ta'izzi-Adeni in the South and Tihami in the West, where is q and is g. Yemeni Arabic is used for daily communications and has no official status; Modern Standard Arabic is used in official purposes, education, commerce and media. Non-Arabic South Semitic languages indigenous to the region include several Modern South Arabian languages, such as the Mehri and Soqotri languages, which are not Arabic languages, but members of an independent branch of the Semitic family. Another separate Semitic family once spoken in the region is Old South Arabian; these became extinct in the pre-Islamic period with the possible exceptions of Razihi and Faifi. Some of these share areal features with Yemeni Arabic due to influence from or on Yemeni Arabic. Yemeni Arabic itself is influenced by Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian and Old South Arabian languages and possesses significant substratum from these languages. San'ani Arabic Ta'izzi-Adeni Arabic Tihamiyya Arabic has many aspects which differentiate it from all other dialects in the Arab world. Phonologically Tihami is similar to the majority of Yemeni dialects, pronouncing the (ق) as q and the (ج) as a velar plosive ɡ (the pronunciation is also shared with Egyptian Arabic). Grammatically, all Tihami dialects also share the unusual feature of replacing the definite article (al-) with the prefix (am-). The future tense, much like the dialects surrounding Sana'a, is indicated with the prefix (š-) for all persons, e.g.
