It is spoken by the Mehri tribes, who inhabit isolated areas of the eastern part of Yemen, western Oman, particularly the Al Mahrah Governorate, with a small number in Saudi Arabia near the Yemeni and Omani borders.

[3] Mehri and its sister MSALs were spoken in the southern Arabian Peninsula before the spread of Arabic along with Islam in the 7th century CE.

Today it is also spoken by Mehri residents in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in Kuwait by guest workers originally from Yemen, as well as nationals with a Yemeni heritage.

It is primarily a spoken language, with little existing vernacular literature and almost no literacy in written Mehri among native speakers.

However, standard Arabic’s deficiencies with respect to MSAL result in this approach representing multiple phonemes with the same letters.

by the MSAL centre at the University of Leeds;[15] a proposed set of additional letters for the Arabic alphabet to adapt it to be able to be a good systemic for writing MSAL languages (including Mehri) by that same centre; and a separate set of additional letters proposed by Almahrah.net for the same purpose are given (along with IPA phonetic transcription and Romanizations) in the columns of the table below.