Hadhrami Arabic

Hadhrami or Ḥaḍrami Arabic is a variety of Arabic spoken by the Hadhrami people (Arabic Ḥaḍārima) living in the Ḥaḍramawt. It is also spoken by many emigrants who migrated from the Ḥaḍramawt 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 /dʒ/-yodization, i.e. changing Classical Arabic reflex /dʒ/ to the approximant ي [j]. In this it resembles some Eastern Arabian and Gulf dialects including the dialects of Basra in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the dialects of the other Arab Emirates. In educated speech, ج is realised as a voiced palatal plosive [ɟ] or affricate [dʒ] in some lexical items which are marked [+ religious] or [+ educated] (see ق /q/ below).