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Possible descendant of Old South Arabian From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Faifi is a possible descendant of Old South Arabian language and is spoken by about 50,000 people[2] in the vicinity of the Fifa Mountains in the southwestern corner of Saudi Arabia and across the border in Jebel Minabbih, Yemen. Along with Razihi, it is possibly the only other possible surviving descendant of the Old South Arabian branch of Central Semitic.
Faifi | |
---|---|
ʾal-lahja ʾal-Fayfiya, Ḫawlāniya | |
/həɾʒət ʔahɪl fəjfə/ | |
Native to | Saudi Arabia, Yemen |
Region | Jebel Fayfa, Jebel Minabbih |
Native speakers | 50,000 (2009)[1] |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | fif |
Glottolog | faif1234 |
Faifi is spoken in an area of roughly 600 km² (232 m²)[2] along the Saudi border known as Jabal Fayfa by some estimated 50,000 people primarily living in the upper part of the mountains. Until 35 years ago no major roads entered Jabal Fayfa and almost everyone is bilingual while younger generations are less immersed in the language than to varieties of Saudi dialects such as Hejazi, Nejdi, and Standard Arabic alongside their own language due to prolonged contact with Arabic language media, education, etc. Education in Jabal Fayfa tends to be bilingual. Many Faifi-speakers leave Jabal Fayfa for educational and work related prospects and thus it is speculated they normally do not transmit their language to their children born outside of the native speech area. Because of such it is suggested that Faifi is an endangered language. Many speakers will switch to known varieties of Arabic to communicate with people outside of Fayfa.
Faifi-speakers have historically enjoyed a sustained degree of independence due to the terrain they inhabit, similar to the peoples of Jabal Minabbih across the border, and thus many of the effects of modernity were experienced later in the region.[3] Much like the peoples of Jabal Razih the peoples of Jabal Fayfa belong to the Ḫawlan bin ʾAmir parent-tribe hence why Ḫawlāniya (IPA: /xawlaːnija/) has become a popular colloquial name for Faifi and neighboring speech varieties.
The classification of Faifi is a topic of great interest since it was first considered to not be a dialect of Arabic. While most discussions of the language cover only the speech variety found in Jebel Fayfa, it has been suggested that the speech variety across the border in Jabal Minabbih is the same language and this would mean that Faifi is spoken on both sides of the Saudi-Yemeni border and encompasses more than just the speech varieties which are the most well documented.[4] In the ISO change request regarding the language it was noted by linguist Michael Ahland himself said that he was "completely convinced that Faifi is an independent language" but did not know what language it could possibly be a dialect of given that it is exceedingly unlike the neighboring Arabic speech varieties.[2][5] The discussion of Faifi as a Sayhadic language is not well studied, and although plausible it is fair to stay on the side of caution given that no definitive comparative study has been conducted between Faifi and any known Sayhadic language, including neighboring Razihit. An air of caution can be found in Lowry (2020) when Faifi is discussed, noting that while some authors jump to claim Faifi as a descendant of a Sayhadic language (more broadly "Himyaritic") Watson (2018) does make the argument that Faifi and Razihit both may be amongst numerous speech varieties in this area that could be holdouts of this long assumed to be extinct branch of Central Semitic.[6]
The consonant inventory of Faifi is as follows according to both Alfaifi & Behnstedt (2010), Alfaife (2018) and Alaslani (2017);[7] allophones are in parentheses and phonemes attested only in Alaslani (2017) are in brackets:
Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Pharyngeal | Glottal | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
plain | emphatic | plain | emphatic | |||||||||
Plosive | voiceless | t | tˤ | k | ʔ | |||||||
voiced | b | d | [ɖ] | g | ||||||||
Affricate | voiceless | (t͡s)2 | t͡ʃ | |||||||||
voiced | (d͡ʒ)4 | |||||||||||
Fricative | voiceless | f | θ | θˤ | s | sˤ (st)5 | ʃ3 | x | [χ] | ħ | h | |
voiced | ð | (ðˤ)1 | z | ʒ | [ɣ] | ʁ | ʕ | |||||
Rhotic | ɾ [r] | |||||||||||
Nasal | m | n | ||||||||||
Approximant | lateral | l | [ɭ] | |||||||||
central | w | j |
Some important features regarding consonant inventory of Faifi include:
The vowel phonemes of Upper Faifi per Alfaife (2018) are as follows:
Some important features regarding the vowel phonemes of Upper Faifi include: