Dhofari Arabic
Zofari Arabic
Native to	Oman
Speakers	130,000 (2020)[1]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Peninsular Dhofari Arabic
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	adf
Glottolog	dhof1235
Location of Dhofari Arabic

Dhofari Arabic, also known asDhofari orZofari, is avariety ofArabic spoken aroundSalalah inOman'sDhofar Governorate.^[1][2] It has theISO 639-3 language code "adf".^[3]

Formerly nomadic and sedentary communities living in the area speak Dhofari Arabic as afirst language,second language, orlingua franca, with varying degrees offluency.^[4]

• [ʒ] only rarely occurs among speakers
• [lˤ] mostly occurs in formal speech.
• /g/ occurs as a reflex of *q in inland and bedouin dialects; /q/ occurs in coastal dialects (Davey).

• A schwa sound[ə] may also occur as a lax realization of short vowels.
• Historical short vowel *a is lengthened to /ā/ in a number of words, e.g. *katab(a) > ktāb 'he wrote', a process called by Richard Davey "iambic vowel lengthening". It does sometimes occur in other positions, perhaps as a result of stress shift.
• Rarely, the historical *ā vowel has been raised and fronted to /ē/ or /ī/, or backed and rounded to /ō/. Raising and fronting of *ā is an important feature in Arabic linguistic history. Both features are unusual in the Arabian Peninsula and are today found in very few lexical items, but are documented in the primary sources of Rhodokanakis (1908,1911) and Davey (2016).

• Peninsular Arabic

• Davey, Richard J. (2013).Coastal Dhofārī Arabic: a sketch grammar (PhD thesis).University of Manchester.
• Davey, Richard J. (2016).Coastal Dhofari Arabic: A Sketch Grammar. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics. Vol. 87. Brill.ISBN 978-90-04-31670-6.OCLC 1264422220.
• Rhodokanakis, Nikolaus (1908).Der Vulgärarabische Dialekt im Đofâr (Ẓfâr).OCLC 503848016.
• Mark Shockley (2024). "Ruʾūs al-Jibāl Arabic in Context: A Proposal for an Expanded Typology of Southeastern Arabian Dialects".Journal of Semitic Studies.69:1–28.

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