The Himyarite language was a South Semitic tongue spoken in the south-western Arabian peninsula until the 10th century. Evidence of ancient culture and fragments of South Arabic inscriptions judged to be Himyaritic have been found dating from before 700 BC.

This language is still in use in a small area of southern Yemen, and it is important for understanding the development of the Semitic language from ancient times. The discovery of the Himyarite language as a living and extant language was due to the exertions of a French researcher named Flugentius Fresnel in the early 19th century. Fresnel had, in letters from Cairo and Jeddah, had made known this curious result of his research. In a trip to Marrah, a mountainous district near the South eastern angle of the Arabian peninsula, he hired a local guide who spoke a language very different from Arabic. When questioned by Fresnel, the guide could not inform him whether his native language was ever written. Fresnel also noticed that this dialect was a Semitic idiom, but a peculiar one.

Fresnel determined this newly discovered dialect to be the descendant of the language of the ancient Himyarites, which he termed "Ehhkili." This was the name of the local people who had preserved the Himyarite idiom in the mountains of Hhazik, Mirbat and Zhafar, in the South Eastern parts of the peninsula. The designation of Ehhkili means 'freemen'; it is opposed to "Tschhari", the general name of the villains or serfs subject to these freemen, who speak, however, the same dialect.

The Ehhkili language approximates, in many respects, to the more northern divisions of the Semitic speech and differs from Arabic. It has many words common to Arabic and Hebrew and Syriac, and some forms peculiarly Hebrew. The Ehhkili is reported to be of very harsh and guttural utterance.

References

Further reading

• This text is adapted from James Cowles Prichard's public domain, Researches Into the Physical History of Mankind.

de:Altsüdarabische Sprache