Hadhrami Arabic

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Hadrami Arabic
Native to Saudi Arabia, Oman, South Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Singapore, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia
Native speakers
400,000 (ca. 1995)[1]
Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3 ayh
Glottolog hadr1236[2]

Hadhrami Arabic, or Ḥaḍrami Arabic, is a variety of Arabic spoken by the Hadhrami people (Ḥaḍārima) living in the Hadhramaut. It is also spoken by many emigrants, who migrated from the Hadhramaut to the Horn of Africa (Somalia and Eritrea), East Africa (Comoros, Zanzibar, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique), Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore) and, recently, to the other Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Below is a brief account of the different linguistic levels of the dialect.


The dialect in many towns and villages in the Wādī (valley) and the coastal region is characterised by its ج //-yodization, changing the Classical Arabic reflex // to the approximant ي [j]. That resembles some Eastern Arabian and Gulf dialects, including the dialects of Basra in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain other Arab Emirates. In educated speech, ج is realised as a voiced palatal plosive [ɟ] or affricate [] in some lexical items which are marked [+ religious] or [+ educated] (see ق /q/ below).

The ق /q/ reflex is pronounced as a voiced velar [ɡ] in all lexical items throughout the dialect. In some other Arabic dialects, /q/ is realised as a voiceless uvular plosive [q] in certain marked lexemes [+ religious], [+ educational]: /qurʔaːn/ “Qur’an”. With the spread of literacy and contact with speakers of other Arabic dialects, future sociolinguistic research may reveal whether using the uvular /q/ in certain lexemes and retaining the velar /ɡ/ for others will occur.

Distinctions ث, ت /t/, /θ/ and ذ, د /d/, /ð/ are made in Wādī, but ض // and ظ /ðˤ/ are both pronounced ظ [ðˤ]. The Coast merges all the pairs into the stops د, ت and ض ([t], [d] and []), respectively.

In non-emphatic environments, /aː/ is realised as a open front (slightly raised) unrounded [æ]. Thus, /θaːniː/ "second," which is normally realised with an [ɑː]-like quality in the Gulf dialects, is realised with an [æː].

The dialect is characterised by not allowing final consonant clusters to occur in final position. Thus, Classical Arabic /bint/ "girl" is realised as /binit/. In initial positions, there is a difference between the Wādī and the coastal varieties. The coast has initial clusters in /bɣaː/ "he wants," /bsˤal/ "onions" and /briːd/ "mail (n.)," but Wādī realises the second and third words as /basˤal/ and /bariːd/, respectively.


When the first person singular comes as an independent subject pronoun, it is marked for gender: /anaː/ for masculine and /aniː/ for feminine. As an object pronoun, it comes as a bound morpheme: /-naː/ for masculine and /-niː/ for feminine. The first person subject plural is naḥnā.

The first person direct object plural is /naħnaː/ rather than the /-naː/ of many dialects. Thus, the cognate of the Classical Arabic /dˤarabanaː/ "he hit us" is /ðˤarab naħnaː/.

Stem VI, tC1āC2aC3, can be umlauted to tC1ēC2aC3, thus changing the pattern vowel ā to ē. That leads to a semantic change, as in /tʃaːradaw/ "they ran away suddenly" and /tʃeːradaw/ "they shirk, try to escape."

Intensive and frequentative verbs are common in the dialect. Thus /kasar/ "to break" is intensified to /kawsar/, as in /koːsar fi l-lʕib/ "he played rough." It can be metathesized to become frequentative, as in /kaswar min iðˤ-ðˤaħkaːt/ "he made a series (lit. breaks) of giggles or laughs."


The syntax has many similarities to other Peninsular Arabic dialects. However, the dialect contains a number of unique particles used for co-ordination, negation, and other sentence types. Examples in coordination include /kann, laːkan/ "but, nevertheless, though," /maː/ (Classical Arabic /ammaː/) "as for…," and /walla/ "or."

Like many other dialects, apophonic or ablaut passive (as in /kutib/ "it was written") is not very common, and Is mainly confined to clichés and proverbs from other dialects, including Classical Arabic.

The particle /qad/ developed semantically in the dialect to /kuð/ or /ɡuð/ "yet, already, almost, nearly" and /ɡad/ or /ɡid/ "maybe, perhaps."


There are a few lexical items that are shared with Modern South Arabian languages, which perhaps distinguish this dialect from other neighbouring Peninsular dialects. The effect of Hadhrami emigration to Southeast Asia (see Arab Indonesians and Arab Singaporeans), the Indian subcontinent and East Africa is clear in the vocabulary especially in certain registers like types of food and dress: /sˤaːruːn/ "sarong." Many loanwords are listed in al-Saqqaf (2006).[3]


  1. ^ Hadrami Arabic at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Hadrami Arabic". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. 
  3. ^ Al-Saqqaf, Abdullah Hassan (15 January 2006). "The Linguistics of Loanwords in Hadrami Arabic". International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 9 (1): 75–93. doi:10.1080/13670050608668631. 

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