ABSTRACT
In the south of the Arabian Peninsula, in the Republic of Yemen and in the Sultanate of Oman, live some 200,000 Arabs whose maternal language is not Arabic but one of the so-called Modern South Arabian Languages (MSAL). This designation is very inconvenient because of the consequent ambiguity, but a more appropriate solution has not been found so far. Although there exists a very close relationship with other languages of the same Western South Semitic group, the MSAL are different enough from Arabic to make intercomprehension impossible between speakers of any of the MSAL and Arabic speakers. The MSAL also exhibit many common features with the Semitic languages of Ethiopia; their relationships with Epigraphic South Arabian (Sahaydic Languages, according to Beeston) remain a point of discussion.
