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Mehri or Mahri is a member of the Modern South Arabian languages, a subgroup of the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family. It is spoken by the Mehri people, who inhabit isolated areas of the eastern part of Yemen and western Oman, particularly the Al Mahrah Governorate. Mehri and its sister Modern South Arabian languages were spoken in the southern Arabian Peninsula before the spread of Arabic along with Islam in the 7th century CE. It is today also spoken by Mehri residents in Qatar, Somalia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in Kuwait by guest workers originally from South Arabia. Given the dominance of Arabic in the region over the past 1400 years and the frequent bilingualism with Arabic among Mehri speakers, Mehri is at some risk of extinction. It is primarily a spoken language, with little existing vernacular literature and almost no literacy in the written form among native speakers. == Dialects == Hamdani (d. 334 / 946) noted that "the Mahra speak a barbarous tongue like foreigners", that is - he knew that Mehri was not intelligible as northwest Semitic.〔Abu Muhammad al-Hasan Hamdani, Sifat Jazirat al-'Arab (probably ed. 1884), 134 tr. 〕 Today Mehri exists in two main dialects, Yemeni Mehri (also known as Southern Mehri) and Omani Mehri (also known as Dhofari Mehri and Nagd Mehri). Omani Mehri is spoken by a smaller population and shows no significant variation within itself, while Yemeni Mehri is further divided into western and eastern dialects. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mehri language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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