Hadhrami Arabic, or Ḥaḍrami Arabic (ḤA), is a variety of Arabic spoken by the Hadhrami people (Ḥaḍārem) living in the region of Hadhramaut in southeastern Yemen, with a small number of speakers found in Kenya.^[1]

The dialect in many towns and villages in the Wādī (valley) and the coastal region is characterised by its ج /dʒ/-yodization, changing the Classical Arabic reflex /dʒ/ to the approximant ي [j]. That resembles some Eastern Arabian and Gulf dialects, including the dialects of Basra in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain other Arab Emirates. In educated speech, ج is realised as a voiced palatal plosive [ɟ] or affricate [dʒ] in some lexical items which are marked [+ religious] or [+ educated] (see ق /q/ below).

The ق /q/ reflex is pronounced as a voiced velar [ɡ] in all lexical items throughout the dialect. In some other Arabic dialects, /q/ is realised as a voiceless uvular plosive [q] in certain marked lexemes [+ religious], [+ educational]: /qurʔaːn/ “Qur’an”. With the spread of literacy and contact with speakers of other Arabic dialects, future sociolinguistic research may reveal whether using the uvular /q/ in certain lexemes and retaining the velar /ɡ/ for others will occur.

When the first person singular comes as an independent subject pronoun, it is marked for gender: /anaː/ for masculine and /aniː/ for feminine. As an object pronoun, it comes as a bound morpheme: /-naː/ for masculine and /-niː/ for feminine. The first person subject plural is naḥnā.

The first person direct object plural is /naħnaː/ rather than the /-naː/ of many dialects. Thus, the cognate of the Classical Arabic /dˤarabanaː/ "he hit us" is /ðˤarab naħnaː/.

Stem VI, tC1āC2aC3, can be umlauted to tC1ēC2aC3, thus changing the pattern vowel ā to ē. That leads to a semantic change, as in /tʃaːradaw/ "they ran away suddenly" and /tʃeːradaw/ "they shirk, try to escape."

Intensive and frequentative verbs are common in the dialect. Thus /kasar/ "to break" is intensified to /kawsar/, as in /koːsar fi l-lʕib/ "he played rough." It can be metathesized to become frequentative, as in /kaswar min iðˤ-ðˤaħkaːt/ "he made a series (lit. breaks) of giggles or laughs."

The syntax has many similarities to other Peninsular Arabic dialects. However, the dialect contains a number of unique particles used for co-ordination, negation, and other sentence types. Examples in coordination include /kann, laːkan/ "but, nevertheless, though," /maː/ (Classical Arabic /ammaː/) "as for…," and /walla/ "or."

Like many other dialects, apophonic or ablaut passive (as in /kutib/ "it was written") is not very common, and is mainly confined to clichés and proverbs from other dialects, including Classical Arabic.

The particle /qad/ developed semantically in the dialect to /kuð/ or /ɡuð/ "yet, already, almost, nearly" and /ɡad/ or /ɡid/ "maybe, perhaps."

There are a few lexical items that are shared with Modern South Arabian languages, which perhaps distinguish this dialect from other neighbouring Peninsular dialects. The effect of Hadhrami emigration to Southeast Asia (see Arab Indonesians and Arab Singaporeans), the Indian subcontinent and East Africa is clear in the vocabulary especially in certain registers like types of food and dress: /sˤaːruːn/ "sarong." Many loanwords are listed in al-Saqqaf (2006).^[3]

• Varieties of Arabic
• Peninsular Arabic