This volume contains a detailed grammatical description of the Omani dialect of Mehri, an unwritten Semitic language of the Modern South Arabian group. It is the first complete grammar of any Modern South Arabian language in a hundred years, and the first ever Mehri grammar based on the Omani dialect, making it an important contribution to the field of Semitic studies in general. Topics in phonology, all aspects of morphology, and a variety of syntactic features are covered in this volume. The grammar is based on texts collected by T.M. Johnstone, and published by H. Stroomer.

This book contains a comprehensive grammatical description of Mehri, an unwritten Semitic language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman, along with a corpus of more than one hundred texts. Topics in phonology, all aspects of morphology, and a variety of syntactic features are covered. The texts, presented with extensive commentary, were collected by the late T.M. Johnstone. Some are published here for the first time, while the rest have been newly edited and translated, based on the original manuscripts. Semitists, linguists, and anyone interested in the folklore of southern Arabia will find much valuable data and analysis in this volume, which is the most detailed grammatical study of a Modern South Arabian language yet published.

Mehri is a South-Semitic language spoken by some 100.000 people in the far eastern governorate in Yemen and in the mountains of Dhofar in Oman. The Mehri texts in this book represent the Omani dialect. The texts are based on the fieldwork materials of the late Professor T. M. Johnstone (1924-1983), an expert in this field.The author Harry Stroomer (Leiden University, The Netherlands) is a specialist in South-Semitic and Berber languages.

This book contains a detailed grammatical description of Jibbali (or Shahri), an unwritten Semitic language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman, along with seventy texts. This is the first ever comprehensive grammar of Jibbali, and the first collection of texts published in over a hundred years. Topics in phonology, all aspects of morphology, and a variety of syntactic features are covered. The texts include those collected by the late T. M. Johnstone (newly edited and translated), as well as new texts collected by the author, while the grammar is based both on the texts and on original fieldwork. Semitists, linguists, and anyone interested in the folklore of Arabia will find much valuable data and analysis in this volume.

Mehri is the most widely spoken of the six Modern South Arabian languages, with populations in eastern Yemen, western Oman, the southern fringes of Saudi Arabia, and parts of the Gulf. The Structure of Mehri is a comprehensive linguistic description of two major Mehri dialect groups: Mahriyot, the eastern Yemeni dialect of Mehri spoken in ?awf, and Mehreyyet, the Mehri of the Omani Najd. It provides the first description of Mahriyot, complementing Wagner (1953), which examines Mehriyet, the western Yemeni dialect of Mehri, and extending Rubin (2010), which deals with Mehreyyet. Based on fieldwork conducted by the author and material in Sima (2009) this is one of the first studies of any non-state language to include data from new technology (SMS and e-mail). Considering also other Modern South Arabian languages where relevant, phonology, morphology and syntax of Mahriyot and Mehreyyet is analysed and compared. Within syntax, particular attention is paid to phrase structure, clause structure, coordination, negation and supplementation. Furthermore, the final chapter provides a selection of the transcribed, translated and annotated oral texts used in the book.

Much of the insight in the field of Arabic linguistics has for a long time remained unknown to linguists outside the field. Regrettably, Arabic data rarely feature in the formulation of theories and analytical tools in modern linguistics. This situation is unfavourable to both sides. The Arabist, once an outrider, has almost become a non-member of the mainstream linguistics community. Consequently, linguistics itself has been deprived of a wealth of data from one of the world's major languages. However, it is reassuring to witness advances being made to integrate into mainstream linguistics the visions and debates of specialists in Arabic. Building on this fruitful endeavour, this book presents thought-provoking, new articles, especially written for this collection by leading scholars from both sides. The authors discuss topics in historical, social and spatial dialectology focusing on Arabic data investigated within modern analytical frameworks.

This book is the first coursebook to deal with the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri. Focussing on Mehri as spoken in Central Dhofar, Oman, the work results from several years' close collaboration with four native speakers of Mehri. The book is multimodal, supported by a large number of audio and audio-visual texts from the Mehri archive housed at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. It comprises twenty lessons and a glossary of all terms occurring in the lessons. Dialogues within the lessons focus as far as possible on aspects of the traditional culture of the Mahrah, thus introducing the student not only to the language, but also to issues of cultural importance.