Mehri language


Mehri or Mahri is a member of the Modern South Arabian languages, a subgroup of the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family. It is spoken by the Mehri tribes, who inhabit isolated areas of the eastern part of Yemen and western Oman, particularly the Al Mahrah Governorate.
Mehri and its sister Modern South Arabian languages were spoken in the southern Arabian Peninsula before the spread of Arabic along with Islam in the 7th century CE. It is today also spoken by Mehri residents in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in Kuwait by guest workers originally from South Arabia.
Given the dominance of Arabic in the region over the past 1400 years and the frequent bilingualism with Arabic among Mehri speakers, Mehri is at some risk of extinction. It is primarily a spoken language, with little existing vernacular literature and almost no literacy in the written form among native speakers.

Dialects

noted that "the Mahra speak a barbarous tongue like foreigners". Elsewhere, Hamdani showed extensive knowledge of Arabian dialects, each of which was rated in its distance from classical Arabic.
Today, Mehri exists in two main dialects, Yemeni Mehri and Omani Mehri. Omani Mehri is spoken by a smaller population and shows no significant variation within itself, but Yemeni Mehri is further divided into western and eastern dialects.

Phonology

Unlike other Modern South Arabian languages, Mehri 'emphatic' consonants are not simply ejectives. They may also be pharyngealized, as in Arabic, so it is possible for Mehri to attest to a transition from proto-Semitic ejective consonants to the pharyngealized emphatics that are found in many Semitic languages.
The consonant inventory is as follows:
The vowel inventory is as follows:
FrontCentralBack
Close
Mid
Mid
Open

Voiced obstruents, or at least voiced stops, devoice in pausa. In this position, both the voiced and emphatic stops are ejective, losing the three-way contrast. Elsewhere, the emphatic and the voiced stops are pharyngealized. Emphatic fricatives have a similar pattern, and in non-pre-pausal position they are partially voiced.
The difference in place of the laterals is not clear. It may be that the approximant is denti-alveolar, like the alveolar occlusives, and the lateral fricatives apical, or it may be that the latter are palato-alveolar or alveolo-palatal. The fricatives are typically transcribed ś, etc.
is only in Arabic loans. It is not clear if the rhotic is a trill or a tap.

Morphology

The following are the personal pronouns of Mehri:
SingularDualPlural
1sthōhkīhnḥah
2ndhēttīhtām
3rdhēhhīhhām

The following are the possessive suffix versions of those pronouns:
SingularDualPlural
1st-ī-kī-n
2nd-k-kī-kam
3rd-h-hī-ham

The independent pronouns can also be placed after the genitive exponent to convert them into possessive pronouns.

Writing system

Mehri, like other MSA languages, possesses a rich oral tradition, but not a written one. There exist three systems for writing the language: the Arabic alphabet, a modified Latin alphabet and a modified Arabic alphabet. The modified Arabic alphabet contains additional letters to represent sounds unique to Mehri.
The most commonly used system is the one with unmodified Arabic letters. This is a defective system and represents multiple phonemes with the same letters. In both Arabic and Arabic modified systems the vowels are not explicitly differentiated, and are differentiated by the readers through context.
The modified Arabic alphabet has various unstandardized systems. The most commonly used modified Arabic additional letters as documented and proposed by the MSAL center at University of Leeds.