Dhofari Arabic

Dhofari Arabic, also known as Dhofari or Zofari, is a variety of Arabic spoken around Salalah in Oman's Dhofar Governorate. It has the ISO 639-3 language code "adf".

Dhofari Arabic
Zofari Arabic
Native to	Oman
Speakers	130,000 (2020)
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Peninsular Dhofari Arabic
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	adf
Glottolog	dhof1235
Location of Dhofari Arabic

Formerly nomadic and sedentary communities living in the area speak Dhofari Arabic as a first language, second language, or lingua franca, with varying degrees of fluency.

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial	Interdental		Dental/Alveolar		Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Glottal
			plain	emph.	plain	emph.
Nasal		m			n
Stop	voiceless				t	tˤ		k	q		ʔ
	voiced	b			d			ɡ
Fricative	voiceless	f	θ		s	sˤ	ʃ	x		ħ	h
	voiced		ð	ðˤ	z		(ʒ)	ɣ		ʕ
Tap					ɾ
Approximant					l	(lˤ)	j	w

• [ʒ] only rarely occurs among speakers
• [lˤ] mostly occurs in formal speech.
• /g/ occurs as a reflex of *q in inland and bedouin dialects; /q/ occurs in coastal dialects (Davey).

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i iː	u uː
Mid	eː	oː
Open	a aː

• A schwa sound [ə] may also occur as a lax realization of short vowels.
• Historical short vowel *a is lengthened to /ā/ in a number of words, e.g. *katab(a) > ktāb 'he wrote', a process called by Richard Davey "iambic vowel lengthening". It does sometimes occur in other positions, perhaps as a result of stress shift.
• Rarely, the historical *ā vowel has been raised and fronted to /ē/ or /ī/, or backed and rounded to /ō/. Raising and fronting of *ā is an important feature in Arabic linguistic history. Both features are unusual in the Arabian Peninsula and are today found in very few lexical items, but are documented in the primary sources of Rhodokanakis (1908,1911) and Davey (2016).

Phoneme	Sound/Allophones
/i/	[i], [ɪ]
/a/	[æ], [ɑ]
/u/	[u], [ʊ]
/aː/	[æː], [ɑː]

See also

• Peninsular Arabic

Bibliography

• Davey, Richard J. (2013). Coastal Dhofārī Arabic: a sketch grammar (PhD thesis). University of Manchester.
• Davey, Richard J. (2016). Coastal Dhofari Arabic: A Sketch Grammar. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics. Vol. 87. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-31670-6. OCLC 1264422220.
• Rhodokanakis, Nikolaus (1908). Der Vulgärarabische Dialekt im Đofâr (Ẓfâr). OCLC 503848016.
• Mark Shockley (2024). "Ruʾūs al-Jibāl Arabic in Context: A Proposal for an Expanded Typology of Southeastern Arabian Dialects". Journal of Semitic Studies. 69: 1–28.