Sabaean language

Sabaic
Native to	Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia
Region	Arabian Peninsula
Extinct	6th century
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic South Western Old South Arabian Sabaic
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Linguist list	xsa
Glottolog	saba1279
Late Kingdom of Saba' (tan) in the 2nd century CE

Sabaean (Sabaic), also sometimes incorrectly known as Ḥimyarite (Himyaritic), was an Old South Arabian language spoken in Yemen from c. 1000 BC to the 6th century AD, by the Sabaeans; it was used as a written language by some other peoples (sha‘bs) of Ancient Yemen, including the Ḥimyarites, Ḥashidites, Ṣirwāḥites, Humlanites, Ghaymānites, and Radmānites. The Sabaean language belongs to the South Arabian subgroup of the Semitic group of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Sabaean is distinguished from the other members of Old South Arabian by the use of h to mark the third person, and as a causative prefix; the other language all use s₁ in these cases; Sabaean is therefore called an h-language, and the others s-languages.

Sabaean was written in the South Arabian alphabet, and like Hebrew and Arabic marked only consonants, the only indication of vowels being with Matres Lectionis. For many years the only texts discovered were inscriptions in the formal Masnad script (Sabaean ms₃nd), but in 1973 documents in another minuscule and cursive script were discovered, dating back to the second half of the 1st century BC; only a few of the latter have so far been published.

The South Arabic alphabet used in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Yemen beginning in the 8th century BC, in all three locations, later evolved into the Ge'ez alphabet. The Ge'ez language however is no longer considered to be a descendant of Sabaean, or of Old South Arabian; and there is linguistic evidence that Semitic languages were in use and being spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia as early as 2000 BC.