Yemeni Arabic Yemeni Arabic is a cluster of varieties of Arabic spoken in Yemen, southwestern Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Djibouti. It is generally considered a very conservative dialect cluster, having many classical features not found across most of the Arabic-speaking world. Yemeni Arabic can be divided roughly into several main dialect groups, each with its own distinctive vocabulary and phonology. The most important four groups are San'ani in the North and Center and Hadhrami in the East, where is pronounced and is or (except in coastal Hadhrami where is ), in addition to Ta'izzi-Adeni in the South and Tihami in the West, where is and is . Yemeni Arabic is used for daily communications and has no official status; Modern Standard Arabic is used in official purposes, education, commerce and media. Non-Arabic South Semitic languages indigenous to the region include several Modern South Arabian languages, such as the Mehri and Soqotri languages, which are not Arabic languages, but members of an independent branch of the Semitic family. Another separate Semitic family once spoken in the region is Old South Arabian; these became extinct in the pre-Islamic period with the possible exception of the Razihi. Some of these share areal features with Yemeni Arabic due to influence from or on Yemeni Arabic. Yemeni Arabic itself is influenced by Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian and Old South Arabian languages and possess significant substratum from these languages. San'ani Arabic dialect Ta'izzi-Ibb Arabic dialect Tihamiyya Arabic Tihamiyya Arabic has many aspects which differentiate it from all other dialects in the Arab world. Phonologically Tihami is similar to the majority of Yemeni dialects, pronouncing the () as and the () as a velar plosive (the pronunciation is also shared with Egyptian Arabic). Grammatically, all Tihami dialects also share the unusual feature of replacing the definite article (al-) with the prefix (am-). The future tense, much like the dialects surrounding Sana'a, is indicated with the prefix (š-), for all persons, e.g. šabūk am-sūq "I will go to the Souq". Some Tihami dialects, such as that spoken in al Hudaydah, are otherwise fairly similar to other Yemeni dialects in grammar and syntax, differing mainly in vocabulary, while others can be so far from any other Arabic dialect that they are practically incomprehensible even to other Yemenis. Zabidi dialect Of all the dialects of the Tihama region, the dialect of Zabid displays the most innovations. It shares the transformed definite article of (am-) originally used in Himyaritic, with the rest of the Tihami dialects, but it is unique in retaining certain of the declensional suffixes in the nominative case. Indefinite masculine nouns in nominal sentences as well as the subjects of verbal sentences are suffixed with the sound (-ū), which stems from the classical suffix (-un/-u). Likewise the phonology of the Zabidi sub-dialect is perhaps unique among all Arabic dialects in that it replaces the sound (ʿain) (ع) with the glottal stop ( ʾ ) (ء). In terms of vocabulary, the Zabidi dialect shares very little with other Arabic dialects, in many respects it seems to be a different language. Zabidis use the verb bāka, yabūk to mean "to go." The word goh#d and goh#da mean man, and woman, respectively. And the word fiyān to mean "where", hence the phrase: fiyān bāyku? meaning "Where are you going?", which is grammatically parallel to the more familiar: wayn rāyih? of more mainstream dialects. Hadhrami Arabic dialect Phonology The Hadhrami dialect in many towns and villages in the Wādī (valley) and the coastal region is characterised by its pronunciation of the voiced palatal plosive (or affricate) (ج) as the semi-vowel (ي) (y)