Shahri was an unwritten language until scholars began to document it, starting in the late nineteenth century. There is oral story-telling, but no written or printed literature. It has never been taught in schools, and economic necessity has compelled Shahri speakers to leave the highlands of Dhofar for opportunities in the coastal area. Parents are less inclined to teach the language to their children than they once were, and older speakers—more proficient in the language than younger people—are dying off.

“The situation of Jibbali is a paradox,” says Khalsa al-Aghbari, a professor of linguistics at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman whose doctoral dissertation was on the formation of plurals in the language. “The young people who speak Jibbali are proud of knowing the language, and proud of their heritage,” she said in an interview. “Yet older speakers complain that the young people don’t speak the language as fluently as their parents.”

The academic study of Shahri and its related languages proceeds at a small scale, in Oman and in Europe and the United States. Useful work remains to be done on the subject, says Rubin. “The language is evolving,” he says, and many words and expressions remain to be collected.

“You never finish studying a language: My grammar can be added to, and there is a need for further understanding of how verbs work, and of phonetics,” he adds.

As ancient cousins of Arabic and Hebrew, the Modern South Arabian languages can help scholars in deepening their understanding of the Qur’an and the Bible, Rubin says. “There’s more to learn.”

Listen to video and audio examples:

Here are two examples of Shahri being spoken. They are from the collection of recordings made by Janet Watson at the University of Leeds and are used with permission. In the first example, below, a man describes the different plants that camels eat.

In the second example, a Shahri speaker describes how people in the mountainous region of Dhofar in Oman knew how to interpret the footprint tracks of animals, and notes that this knowledge is disappearing.

Translation:

“Yes, now I will tell you about people in the past. People in the past would track livestock, they would track livestock, that is to say they would look for their camels or their livestock. People would say camels have run away, they would look for them from valley to valley, they would track their tracks. That is to say the track of livestock. Some people in the past, now I don’t know how to track, but people in the past knew. They would recognise tracks, tracks of livestock, and tracks of people. They would say, ‘So-and-so can track tracks, or in order to look for something they would track and if they found the tracks of livestock, their track, for example, a camel, they would say, ‘I’ve found her track here and he would know that she had come up from that valley or gone down the valley or rested or had gone upstream, and some people would know the tracks of people too. From their knowledge. They would say that track is the track of someone who is not from here, for example, or they would say that is the track of so-and-so, when they tracked, they would say that is the track of so-and-so or the track of someone who was known. Some people would know, but not many. They would know the tracks of their livestock mainly, livestock they had and the like, they would know their livestock, and so-and-so’s camel, their track: that is the track, for example, of so-and-so’s camel, so-and-so’s male camel. Do you understand? They would also know the tracks of other animals such as such-and-such, such as leopards or wolves or hyenas. People would say that is the track of a leopard, that is the track of a wolf, that is the track of a hyena, and that is the track of, I don’t know what, a dog. People in the past knew tracks, they had lots of knowledge. Now, we of this generation, we don’t know tracks very much. We don’t know tracks and we can’t track like the people of the past. People in the past could track better. That is about tracks.”