Janet C.E. Watson

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Honorary Professor at University of St Andrews

Harvesting the Sea in Southeastern Arabia brings together and investigates relationships between ecosystems, cultures, and languages. We focus on four regions of southern and eastern Arabia: Musandam Peninsula, the Bathari seaboard opposite the al-Hallaniyyat Islands, Dhofar and al-Mahrah, and the island of Soqotra. These are regions in which indig...

This edited volume emerged from an AHRC-funded network on Language and Nature in Southern and Eastern Arabia, which ran from 2017 to 2019. The network included three-day, face-to-face workshops at Qatar University in February 2017 and the University of Leeds in April 2019, and a video conference in October 2018. The volume takes a multidisciplin...

The first teaching grammar of a Modern South Arabian languages, this course focusses on the Mehri spoken by tribes in Central Dhofar and informs about the culture and local ecosystems alongside the language

This book is the first comprehensive account of the phonology and morphology of Arabic. It is a pioneering work of scholarship based on the author's research in the region. Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by some 250 million people in an area stretching from Morocco in the West to parts of Iran in the East. Apart from its great intrinsic intere...

A discussion of the project that led to Yemeni poetry on the frontline: Love and conflict, including the aims for long-term preservation of traditional and new, oral and written popular literature, the examination of poetic expressions of conflict and conflict resolution within tribal conflict: 1962 Revolution and 2011-present civil war, the engage...

Geoffrey Khan’s pioneering scholarship has transformed the study of Semitic languages, literatures, and cultures, leaving an indelible mark on fields ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dialectology to medieval manuscript traditions and linguistic typology. This Festschrift, celebrating a distinguished career that culminated in his tenure (201...

Geoffrey Khan’s pioneering scholarship has transformed the study of Semitic languages, literatures, and cultures, leaving an indelible mark on fields ranging from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic dialectology to medieval manuscript traditions and linguistic typology. This Festschrift, celebrating a distinguished career that culminated in his tenure (201...

This is a running bibliography of the Modern South Arabian languages. We aim to update it at least every three months or when significant new works are published. Please do send any additional publications to Janet Watson for inclusion in the bibliography: jcew@st-andrews.ac.uk or jcewatson8@gmail.com. A new version has been added on 12th Februar...

Traditional livelihoods and the ecosystems that sustain them are dying out around the world. This book is a collection of research on the relationships between people, their environment, their expertise and their languages along the ecologically fragile coasts of the Arabian Peninsula. These studies are the outcome of many years of collaborative fi...

Traditional livelihoods and the ecosystems that sustain them are dying out around the world. This book is a collection of research on the relationships between people, their environment, their expertise and their languages along the ecologically fragile coasts of the Arabian Peninsula. These studies are the outcome of many years of collaborative fi...

The third e-book and second/third printed book in the Selim series. These children's books are produced in the Mehri language of Central Dhofar. The illustrations for this book were created by Matthew Logue. Here Selim and his mother encounter the sounds of various domestic and wild animals. You learn terms for the different sounds from various ani...

Consanguineal and affinal kinship terms in the Modern South Arabian languages, Mehri and Shehret, including the morpho-syntax of certain terms and the way in which kin terms pattern.

Southern Arabia is a site of considerable linguistic, ecological, and cultural diversity. Yet, it remains relatively understudied as a region in comparison to other areas of the Arabian Peninsula and the wider MENA region—this notwithstanding the endangered status of its cultures and environment. Furthermore, research in the Humanities is generally...

This edited volume brings together a diverse and rich set of contributions on the Arabian Peninsula. Ranging from history, field linguistics, and cultural studies these essays address the diversity of languages, ways of life, and natural environments that have marked the region throughout its history. The book stems from the intellectual exchange a...

Seven texts in the Mehri spoken by the Afari tribe based in Habrut, western Oman, with discussion of the linguistic features exhibited by the dialect. Note the date in the dedication is incorrect! I first met Stefan Weninger in 2001, *not* 2021.

In many parts of the developed and developing world, traditional children's rhymes are under threat. The disappearance of these traditional rhymes may impact the child's phonological development (Di Liberto et al., 2023, Harper, 2011), awareness of their natural environment, and their appreciation (and later composition) of poetry by older speakers...

An acoustic and electrolaryngographic analysis of plosives in Shehret. As voiced and emphatic obstruents pattern together morphophologically, the research which asks whether voiced and emphatic plosives share share acoustic and glottal state features that distinguish them from voiceless plosives.

The articulation of pre-pausal unbreathed sonorants in Mehri and breathed and unbreathed sonorants in Shehret. The media files can be accessed from Borealis at: https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/VPH6HH.

The paper discusses epenthesis and vowel intrusion in the Central Dhofari variety of Mehri, one of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia. Mehri is spoken by members of the Mahrah tribe in southern Oman, eastern Yemen, parts of southern and eastern Saudi Arabia and in communities in parts of the Gulf and East Af...

This paper examines pre-aspirated sonorants in the Central and Eastern varieties of Shehret, an endangered Modern South Arabian language (MSAL) spoken by c. 50,000 speakers in Dhofar, southern Oman. We assume pre-aspirated sonorants fall in the class of breathy sonorants, acknowledged to be typologically rare [1], [2], and phonotactically tightly r...

Sélim e a súa sombre is a children's book in Mehri created by Abdullah Musallam al-Mahri and Janet C.E. Watson, with illustrations by Domenyk Eades and the Mehri translated into Galician by Gisela Tomé Lourido.

This panel examines the effects of socio-economic and climate change on language, culture and ecology in Oman, with primary focus on the southern province, Dhofar. The speakers in this multidisciplinary panel include native speakers of the endangered Modern South Arabian languages of Dhofar, Mehri, Shehret and Hobyot, experts on endangered language...

Over the past half century, the world has experienced rapid and drastic transitions that have severely affected traditional cultures and ecosystems: geopolitical power shifts, economic turbulence, climate change, and the media revolution. In Oman, the magnitude and effects of the oil era and the carbon emission produced have only recently been gra...

Contemporary Earth is facing a dual-extinction crisis; biologists estimate annual losses of species at least 1000 times that of historic background rates, whilst linguists predict up to 90% of languages could become extinct by the end of the century. Prior research has noted a tendency for biological and linguistic diversity to co-occur in time and...

This chapter describes public engagement during and beyond a Leverhulme Trust-funded project Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian (DEAMSA) (January 2013–December 2016). The documentation project did not include public engagement as an explicit strategy; however, from the outset, the project team insisted on wide com...

A children's story in Mehri created by Abdullah Musallam al-Mahri and Janet C.E. Watson, with illustrations by Domenyk Eades. The Mehri voice recording can be accessed from YouTube on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nZwfwwhJLc. Also access the QR code to the Mehri and Galician voiceovers, given as supplementary material. The book was first publis...

‘The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.’ Jay Griffiths In this talk, we examine the effects of erosion of the traditional human–nature on local language, taking as a case study Dhofar in Southern Oman, home to a family of endangered Modern South Arabian languages. Since the 1970s, Dhof...

A story of my fieldwork journey from the mid-1980s to the present.

The set of consonants /b m y/ and historical *w in the Central and Eastern varieties of the Modern South Arabian language, Shehret (Jibbali), pattern together phonologically in the following ways: all are subject to intervocalic elision; between underlying /e/~/i/ and a stressed mid vowel, /b/ patterns with /m/ in being realised as [y]~[əy] in a ra...

This paper presents a theoretical and quantitative analysis of epenthesis and vowel intrusion in Central Dhofari Mehri. One of six endangered Modern South Arabian languages indigenous to southern Arabia, Mehri is spoken by members of the Mahrah tribe in southern Oman, eastern Yemen, parts of southern and eastern Saudi Arabia and in diasporic commun...

Shehret (aka Jibbali, or Shahri) is a Modern South Arabian language (MSAL) spoken in southern Oman by approximately 50,000 people. Among its 36 consonant phonemes are three voiceless-voiced-emphatic (pharyngealized) triads of fricatives at the interdental, alveolar and alveolar-lateral places of articulation (Rubin, 2014): /θ ð θˤ, s z sˤ, ɬ ɮ ɬˤ/....

This paper presents an acoustic and auditory analysis of the short vowels of Mehri, a Modern South Arabian language (MSAL) spoken in Dhofar (southern Oman), eastern Yemen and parts of southern Saudi Arabia. Interest in Mehri vowels lies in the fact that phonologically distinct vowels are often phonetically extremely close: a fact of significance bo...

The rich ecolinguistic system of Dhofar, Oman and Mahra, Yemen stems from the human population’s close connection with the natural environment. Western technology was not introduce on a wide scale until 1970 and so, until recently, people depended on what they could grow or create from the natural resources available. This link to the natural envir...

A work-in-progress laryngographic investigation of the Shehret alveolar and interdental fricative triads, with instrumental work conducted by Barry Heselwood. Presented at the online workshop on Language and Nature in Southern Arabian: Phonetics and Phonology session 2, 23rd March 2021

An acoustic investigation of intrusive and epenthetic vowels in Mehri of Central Dhofar, with a look at intrusive vowels in Shehret

In examining inflectional and derivational morphology in Arabic, this chapter begins by discussing the concept of the morpheme, and then outlining the general distinctions between inflectional and derivational morphology; in Section 17.3, it discusses the basis of derivation in Arabic and examines derivation in terms of change in meaning and in ter...

This is the latest children’s e-book in Mehri produced for the Leverhulme Trust-funded Documentation of Modern South Arabian project (2013–2016), and the second story in the Selim and the Natural World series. It is published along with Selim and the Dom Fruit in Language & Ecology 2019-2020: http://ecolinguistics-association.org/journal/4563035324...

Beauty in Diversity: Language, Culture and Nature in Southern Arabia In this talk, we interrogate the concept of beauty in relation to Southern Arabia, with a focus on Dhofar. We propose that beauty stems not from one single object or concept of objective beauty, but rather from the rich juxtaposition of objects and concepts of difference. In rela...

This paper examines the changing relationship between language and nature in Dhofar, Oman. Our hypothesis is that local languages enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the natural environment throughout the world, and that both the demise of local ecosystems and the demise of the human-nature relationship will adversely affect local languages (e.g. R...

Description of traditional frankincense work with terms for people and tools involved. Published in Mehri, English translation available on request

This paper examines the relationship between language and nature in southern and eastern Arabia. The work is the result of a two-year interdisciplinary network between the University of Leeds and Qatar University, with partners in the UK, Oman, Canada, the United States, and Russia. Our hypothesis is that local languages and ecosystems enjoy a symb...

This is the first in a series of e-books in Mehri about a little boy and his adventures in Dhofar. The books are designed to involve interaction with nature. The writing was a collaborative effort between Abdullah Musallam al-Mahri and Janet Watson. The photos were taken in Dhofar by Janet Watson, with the photographs of the Ziziphus leucodermis ki...

The first pedagogical grammar of a Modern South Arabian language, this course teaches about the language within its culture and ecosystems. The book makes reference to sound and video files produced by the authors and stored at the ELAR archive

An updated and corrected version of the MSAL bibliography.

This book is the first coursebook to deal with the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri. Focussing on Mehri as spoken in Central Dhofar, Oman, the work results from several years’ close collaboration with four native speakers of Mehri. The book is multimodal, supported by a large number of audio and audio-visual texts from the Mehri archive housed...

This is an update of the Modern South Arabian bibliography

In this paper, we discuss conducting community-based fieldwork with speakers of the Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) in southern Oman, eastern Yemen and eastern Saudi Arabia for a Leverhulme-funded project: The Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of Modern South Arabian. The paper begins with a brief introduction to the languages, their...

In this talk, I discuss a community documentation project conducted on the Modern South Arabian languages in southern Oman between January 2013 and December 2016. I will begin by appraising the language/culture/ecosystem situation in the region, looking at the relationship between language, culture and the natural environment. I will then examine d...

This paper addresses the relationship between language and nature in Dhofar. We begin by considering how erosion of the environment and the relationship people have with the environment can precipitate language loss. We consider how the relationship between language and nature is expressed, referring to transcribed oral texts to illustrate points a...

This volume is the result of collaborative work conducted with a number of native speakers of the languages over several years. The volume presents a comparative cultural glossary of 345 head terms, which are given in the six Modern South Arabian languages: Group I: Mehri, Harsusi and Bathari; Group II: Sheret, Sokotri and Hobyot. The groupings are...

It seemed to the authors that a basic comparative cultural glossary across all six Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) might serve as a useful tool at this stage in the burgeoning field of the study of the MSAL. The glossary comprises 345 head terms, which are given in Mehri, Baṭḥari, Ḥarsūsi, Hobyōt, Śḥerɛ̄t and Soḳoṭri. This list of head terms...

In this paper, we provide a synchronic account of word stress in the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri, as spoken by members of the Bit Thuwar tribe. The data is taken from the first author’s own fieldwork working in Central Dhofar with members of the Bit Thuwar sub-tribes–Bit Iqhōr in Rabkut and parts of the mountains that receive the monsoon r...

In this presentation I look at the relationship between language and nature in the Modern South Arabian communities, with a focus on communities that speak Mehri and Shehret.

Silent articulations in Mehri, a Modern South Arabian language Barry Heselwood, University of Leeds, b.c.heselwood@leeds.ac.uk Janet Watson, University of Leeds, j.c.e.watson@leeds.ac.uk Silent articulations have only rarely been reported as occurring systematically in the phonologies of languages. Lawson et al. (2015) found Scottish English speake...

The practice and denotation of tense and aspect differ in Arabic and English, so there is a challenge when translating between the two languages, particularly when the appropriate translation depends on a range of linguistic contexts 1 , comprising also the context of use. In this paper, the Qur'anic Arabic corpus of verbs is used in Arabic with th...

There is so far only limited research that applies a corpus-based approach to the study of the Arabic language. The primary purpose of this paper is therefore to explore the verb systems of Arabic and English using the Quranic Arabic Corpus, focussing on their similarities and differences in tense and aspect as expressed by verb structures and thei...

There is so far only limited research that applies a corpus-based approach to the study of the Arabic language. The primary purpose of this paper is therefore to explore the verb systems of Arabic and English using the Quranic Arabic Corpus, focussing on their similarities and differences in tense and aspect as expressed by verb structures and thei...

This paper examines the role of gesture in communication in two Modern South Arabian languages, Mehri and Śḥerɛ̄ t. We draw on audiovisual data of map and shape tasks collected in a purpose-built recording laboratory at the University of Leeds from three native speakers. This is the first paper to approach gesture in Modern South Arabian (MSAL), an...

This paper addresses the relationship between language and nature in Dhofar. We begin by considering how erosion of the environment and the relationship people have with the environment can precipitate language loss. We consider how the relationship between language and nature is expressed, referring to transcribed oral texts to illustrate points a...

The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an important computational resource for research in Arabic. The main purpose of this paper is to provide some details of morphological and syntactic structures of Arabic and English verbs through computing studies of their use in the Quran. The paper will also highlight some investigations into the use of a sub-verb cor...

The aim of this study is to examine the challenges of handling verb tense and aspect in Arabic to English machine translation. A small corpus of selected Arabic sentences was submitted to Google Translate for a contrastive analysis of Arabic and English verb tense use. The main purpose of this study is to provide an understanding of morphology and...

With the Islamic conquests, and in the centuries that followed, Arabic came into close contact with the original ancient non-Arabic languages of the Peninsula, leaving the language situation in the south-west of the Arabian Peninsula today as one in which dialects of Arabic exhibit, to a greater or lesser degree, linguistic features of ASA and the...

Language and Nature in Dhofar Documentation of culture-specific texts in Modern South Arabian during a Leverhulme-funded project conducted between 2013-2016 shows that appreciation and expression of nature are bound tightly to language of use. In these languages, cardinal points and directions are based on topographic terms and differ according to...

This paper describes an Arabic dialect identification system which we developed for the Discriminating Similar Languages (DSL) 2016 shared task. We classified Arabic dialects by using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data analytic tool which contains many alternative filters and classifiers for machine learning. We experimented wit...

This chapter examines phonation categories and glottal states in the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri, as spoken in southern Oman and eastern Yemen with reference also to its sister language, Śḥerɛ̄ t, and in San'ani Arabic from an Emergent Features perspective (Mielke 2008). Within the paper, we consider the extent to which these language vari...

This chapter examines phonation categories and glottal states in the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri, as spoken in southern Oman and eastern Yemen with reference also to its sister language, Śḥerɛ̄ t, and in San'ani Arabic from an Emergent Features perspective (Mielke 2008). Within the paper, we consider the extent to which these language vari...

The Arabic language has not been widely studied in computational terms. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to provide an understanding of morphology and forms of Arabic and English verbs in their syntactic context, in order to reveal details that can be used in current machine processing systems.

This paper explores conceptual and descriptive parallels between the Ancient Greek ψιλά–δασέα distinction as found in the Peripatetic text De Audibilibus , and the gˇahr–hams distinction in the medieval Arabic writings of Al-Ḫalīl (d. c.786 A.D.) and Sībawayhi (d. c.796 A.D.). In both cases there is a focus on the absence versus presence of audible...

This paper explores conceptual and descriptive parallels between the Ancient Greek psi iota lambda alpha-delta alpha sigma epsilon alpha distinction as found in the Peripatetic text De Audibilibus, and the g. ahr-hams distinction in the medieval Arabic writings of Al-.alil (d. c. 786 A. D.) and Sibawayhi (d. c. 796 A. D.). In both cases there is a...

In this paper I examine a selection of key phonetic, phonological, and morphological commonalities exhibited by Ancient South Arabian (ASA), Modern South Arabian (MSAL), and Arabic varieties spoken in western Yemen, south-western Saudi Arabia, and Oman, drawing relevant comparisons with Ethio-Semitic. This study shows a wide range of shared and ove...

This chapter examines the verbal systems of two Semitic languages spoken in Oman. According to Holes (2004), the Classical Arabic verbal system is primarily aspectual in nature, although in many modern Arabic dialects this has evolved into absolute tense systems. In many conservative Bedouin varieties of Arabic such as the Najdi dialect described b...

Traditionally a defining aspect of Bedouin culture, the role of the camel among the Omani Bedouin has diminished significantly due to rapid modernization throughout the country. The very rich camel culture of the Bedouin of Oman is reflected most obviously in their terminology for camel husbandry, made famous in classical Arabic poetry and prose; o...

There are three major dialect groups of Mehri: Western Yemeni Mehri (henceforth WYM); Mahriyōt, also known as eastern Yemeni Mehri; and Mehreyyet, also known as Omani Mehri. In this chapter, we argue that negation patterns in Mehri result from grammaticalisation of the anaphoric negator, 1 examine negation patterns in the dialects as reflecting sta...

Within the series of peer-reviewed proceedings resulting from the Arabic Linguistics Society meetings, this volume brings together papers on Arabic phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, and language acquisition, learning, and contact. Part of its aim is also to showcase the contribution of Arabic linguistics to research on linguistics in...

We present laryngographic data from four speakers of English English (EE), four speakers of Western Libyan Arabic (WLA), and four speakers of South-West Saudi-Arabian Arabic (SWSA) producing words ending in VC. They were recorded to capture synchronised acoustic and laryngographic signals whilst producing single words in which the final prepausal C...