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- Yemeni Arabic (arye)


Yemeni Arabic (Arabic: لهجة يمنية, romanized: Lahja Yamaniyyah) is spoken in Yemen and southwestern Saudi Arabia by 30 million people. It is generally considered a very conservative dialect, 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. It is used for daily communications and has no official status; Modern Standard Arabic is used for official purposes, education, commerce and media.

For day-to-day conversations, the Yemeni colloquial Arabic varieties are used. Each of these varieties are grammatically simplified derivations of the Modern Standard variety, removing many of Arabic’s complex features including the dual-plural form and grammatical case endings. With that said, compared to other Arab majority nations’ colloquial varieties, Yemeni Arabic is conservative, in that it maintains more of the grammatical and phonological features from Modern Standard.

Yemeni Arabic also has several eccentricities, making it challenging for non-Yemenis – even native Arabic speakers – to understand the country’s colloquial varieties. A clear example of this is that Yemeni Arabic is commonly spoken in its own rapid and rhythmic pace, often with the inclusion of unique pronunciation characteristics. Speakers from the south-western governorate of Ibb, for instance, add heavy nasal sounds to their pronunciation of particular letters. Likewise, many Arabic letters are pronounced differently from region to region. Thus, even though words are written the same throughout the country, they will be spoken differently. For instance, the word for “coffee” can be pronounced as qahuah or gahuah, similarly “man” is pronounced as rijal in some areas and riyal in others.

The Yemeni people are almost entirely Islamic except for a handful of foreign nationals living there. Christianity is growing however, at twice the world-wide rate.

Sources: Wikipedia
Omniglot
The Joshua Project
https://imminent.translated.com/data-index/yemen



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