[2][3] The speakers of Rijāl Almaʿ are a rather unique presence in Asir given their historical autonomy both on cultural and political terms, which resulted in a more complicated relationship between them and the Saudi state.

[5] The modern village of Rijāl Almaʿ is a popular tourist destination in Saudi Arabia and is a tentative UNESCO world heritage site.

The most well known feature of Rijāl Almaʿ is its pronominal canon, with the demonstrative and relative pronouns garnering the most attention given that they seem to be inherited not from Arabic but instead a Sayhadic language, presumably Late Sabaic.

[10] Unlike other speech varieties in the area the nominal endings in Rijāl Almaʿ vary based upon whether they occur in pausal position, the gender of the noun, the definiteness, and the grammatical number.

Much like in the speech varieties if the Jizan mountains and Northwestern Yemen Rijāl Almaʿ exhibits a distinction between pausal and non-pausal forms for indefinite marking: This differs substantially from so-called "dialectal tanwīn" in most Arabic dialects,[11] and from that of the Faifi language where there is no recorded distinction made for feminine nouns and the indefinite marking has been generalized to /-in/ on all nouns regardless of gender or number.