This article is about the language. For the script in which it was written, see Ancient South Arabian script.
Old South Arabian
Yemenite Ṣayhadic
Geographic distribution
Southern Arabia
Linguistic classification
Afro-Asiatic
Semitic
West Semitic
South Semitic ?
Old South Arabian
Subdivisions
Sabaean †
Minaeic (Madhabic) †
Qatabanic †
Hadramitic †
Awsānian †
Himyaritic †
? Razihi
? Faifi
? Rijāl Almaʿ
Glottolog
sayh1236
Transliteration key for South Arabian in several scripts
Old South Arabian[1][2][3] (also known as Ancient South Arabian (ASA), Epigraphic South Arabian, Ṣayhadic, or Yemenite) is a group of four closely related extinct languages (Sabaean/Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramitic, Minaic) spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest preserved records belonging to the group are dated to the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE.[4] They were written in the Ancient South Arabian script.
There were a number of other Old South Arabian languages (e.g. Awsānian), of which very little evidence has survived, however. A pair of possible surviving Sayhadic languages is attested in the Razihi language and Faifi language spoken in far north-west of Yemen, though these varieties of speech have both Arabic and Sayhadic features, and it is difficult to classify them as either Arabic dialects with a Sayhadic substratum, or Sayhadic languages that have been restructured under pressure of Arabic.
^Nebes, Norbert; Stein, Peter (2008). "Ancient South Arabian". In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.). The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia(PDF). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 145–178. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486890. ISBN 9780511486890.
^Avanzini, Alessandra (2009). "Origin and Classification of the Ancient South Arabian Languages". Journal of Semitic Studies. 54 (1): 205–220. doi:10.1093/jss/fgn048. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
^"Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-11-30. Retrieved 2017-05-15.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
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