Himyaritic language

Himyaritic is a sparsely attested Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Yemen by the Himyarites. It was a Semitic language but either did not belong to the Old South Arabian (Sayhadic) languages according to Christian Robin or was, as more widely accepted, not a distinct language from Sabaic. The precise position inside Semitic is unknown because of the limited knowledge of the language if it is indeed a distinct language from Sabaic.

Although the Himyar kingdom was an important power in South Arabia since the 1st century B.C., the knowledge of the supposed Himyaritic language is very limited, if at all a distinct language, because all known Himyarite inscriptions were written in Sabaic, an Old South Arabian language. The three Himyaritic texts appeared to be rhymed (sigla ZI 11, Ja 2353 and the Hymn of Qāniya). Himyaritic is only known from statements of Arab scholars from the first centuries after the rise of Islam. According to their description, it was unintelligible for speakers of Arabic hence why it had the derogatory designation of ṭumṭumāniyya (طمطمانية); a term explained as a form of speech resembling non-Arabs.

Attestation

Part of the issue with defining Himyaritic is that the term itself is a catch-all term used by Arab grammarians after the Arabization of the Yemeni highlands and in reality could represent a number of speech varieties belonging to the Sayhadic branch of Central Semitic, meaning that ultimately determining the "distribution" of said language could be misleading. As suggested by Peter Stein, the language of the Himyarites may have been no different than that of neighboring Sabaic-speaking peoples and thus what is documented in works such as al-Hamdani's al-Iklīl may in fact be the mixed speech of individuals who speak early varieties of Arabic with influence from spoken Sayhadic languages of the time. Stein points out that the few supposed examples of Himyaritic lay outside of the Himyarite heartland and instead in areas that are historically Sabaic speaking, with Qāniya and Ja 2353 being written in an area that historically used the Radmanite dialect of Sabaic and ZI 11 coming from Mārib, the historical center of the Sabaic language and Sabaean state.