Languages of Southern Arabia

The special session in 2013, Languages of Southern Arabia, was the fifth in the Seminar for Arabian Studies special session series. This was the first special session with an explicit linguistic focus to be held at the Seminar, and aimed to bring together experts on the extinct and extant languages of southern Arabia to pave the way for identifying cultural, lexical, morphological, syntactic, phonological, and phonetic links between the language families, and to discuss advances in the field and future avenues of research. Work to date had highlighted shared linguistic features across the extinct and extant languages of the region, in many cases where languages are separated by large geographical distances. With papers dealing with Ancient South Arabian, the Modern South Arabian languages, and the Arabic dialects of the southern part of the Peninsula, this session examined and re-examined links within and between the language groups and further afield.

The session not only brought together established and early career scholars of the three language groups, but also experts on different types of oral and written texts — narratives, poetry and songs, and different aspects of linguistics — epigraphy, syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology, and phonetics.