Yemeni Arabic

Yemeni Arabic
لهجة يمنية
Native to	Yemen and southern Saudi Arabia
Ethnicity	Yemenis
Native speakers	30 million (2020)[1]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Peninsular Yemeni Arabic
Dialects	Hadhrami Sanaani Ta'izzi-Adeni Judeo-Yemeni
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Variously: ayh – Hadhrami Arabic ayn – Sanaani Arabic acq – Ta'izzi-Adeni Arabic jye – Judeo-Yemeni Arabic
Glottolog	sana1295  Sanaani hadr1236  Hadrami taiz1242  Ta'izzi-Adeni jude1267  Judeo-Yemeni
Areas where Yemeni Arabic is spoken (in dark blue those areas where it is widely spoken).(The map does not indicate where the language is majority or minority.)
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Yemeni Arabic (Arabic: لهجة يمنية, romanized: Lahja Yamaniyyah) is a cluster of varieties of Arabic spoken in Yemen and southwestern Saudi Arabia.^[2] 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 four most important groups are San'ani in the North and Centre and Hadhrami in the East, where ⟨ق⟩ is pronounced [g] and ⟨ج⟩ is [d͡ʒ] or [ʄ] (except in coastal Hadhrami where ⟨ج⟩ is [j]), in addition to Ta'izzi-Adeni in the South and Tihami in the West, where ⟨ق⟩ is [q] and ⟨ج⟩ is [g]. Yemeni Arabic is used for daily communications and has no official status; Modern Standard Arabic is used for 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 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 owing 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.^[3]