Himyaritic language

Himyaritic^[1] is an unattested or sparsely attested Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Yemen, by the Himyarite tribal confederacy.^[2] It was a Semitic language but either did not belong to the Old South Arabian (Sayhadic) languages according to Christian Robin or was, as more widely accepted, not a distinct language from Sabaic.^[3] The precise position inside Semitic is unknown because of the limited knowledge of the language if it is indeed a distinct language from Sabaic.^[4]

Although the Himyar kingdom was an important power in South Arabia since the 1st century B.C., the knowledge of the supposed Himyaritic language is very limited if at all a distinct language, because all known Himyarite inscriptions were written in Sabaic, an Old South Arabian language. The three Himyaritic texts appeared to be rhymed (sigla ZI 11, Ja 2353 and the Hymn of Qāniya). Himyaritic is only known from statements of Arab scholars from the first centuries after the rise of Islam. According to their description it was unintelligible for speakers of Arabic hence why it had the derogatory designation of /tˤumtˤumaːnijja/; a term explained as 'a form of speech resembling non-Arabs'.