ABSTRACT
Mehri is spoken by approximately 130,000 people in the eastern part of Yemen and southwestern part of Oman, as well as by a small number of speakers in adjacent areas of Saudi Arabia. Mehri has no written tradition, and has been known to scholars only since the 1840s. The language has a number of regional dialects, which can be roughly divided into Yemeni and Omani varieties; all dialects are mutually intelligible. Mehri is one of the six so-called Modern South Arabian (MSA) languages, along with Jibbali, Harsusi, Soqotri, Hobyot and Bathari. Thomas, who was not a trained linguist, published a sketch of four MSA languages, one of which was Mehri. Nevertheless, his original data, which were analyzed later by Wolf Leslau, can still be useful. Wagner is a study of Mehri syntax, though based entirely on the publications of the Austrians and on Thomas’s sketch.
