Himyaritic language

According to their description it was unintelligible for speakers of Arabic hence why it had the derogatory designation of /tˤumtˤumaːnijja/; a term explained as 'a form of speech resembling non-Arabs'.

Part of the issue with defining Himyaritic is that the term itself is a catch-all term used by Arab grammarians after the Arabization of the Yemeni highlands[5] and in reality could represent a number of speech varieties belonging to the Sayhadic branch of Central Semitic, meaning that ultimately determining the "distribution" of said language could be misleading.

As suggested by Peter Stein the language of the Himyarites may have been no different than that of neighboring Sabaic-speaking peoples and thus what is documented in works such as al-Hamdani's al-Iklīl may in fact be the mixed speech of individuals who speak early varieties of Arabic with influence from spoken Sayhadic languages of the time.

Restö (2000:115) goes as far as suggesting that even in the modern day a similar dynamic may exist for the so-called k-dialects of highland Yemen where "all other elements connecting them with other Arabic dialects are borrowings" and in reality they may be surviving Sayhadic speech varieties.

[6] Stein leaves open the question that perhaps due to the writing style the expression of definiteness was normally left out, and that the usage of /ʔam-/ in the oral poetry of speakers of various Yemeni Arabic dialects might ultimately be of ancient origin.

The preservation of the k-suffix in modern speech varieties of southern Arabia is for instance found in the Yāfiʿī dialects of southern Yemen; the following perfect verbal forms are from the dialect of Jabal Yazīdī:[10] One of the features considered distinctive to even al-Hamdani was the supposed "drawl" that speakers of Himyaritic had (jad͡ʒurruːna fiː kalaːmihim), which is suggested to have been due to the absence of stress in Sayhadic or at least stress as was familiar to Arabic-speakers.