A sketch of the Kuria Muria language variety and other aspects of Modern South Arabian

This thesis discusses a number of open questions and explores various understudied and unstudied aspects of Modern South Arabian (MSA) linguistics and MSA studies at large. Namely, it contains an extensive literature review which offers a summary of the most significant works in the field, a discussion about the internal sub-grouping and the internal cohesion of Modern South Arabian within Semitic, a grammatical sketch of the Jibbali/Shehret variety spoken on al-Ḥallāniyya island in the Kuria Muria Archipelago: this description focuses on the differences between this and the better-studied mainland varieties. The syntax section, however, takes into account not only the insular variety, but also central and eastern Jibbali/Shehret, in order to present a clearer picture of the syntactic features of this language. In the chapter that follows, a discussion about the lexical interferences of Arabic and Austronesian in Modern South Arabian is presented. Furthermore, the thesis contains three appendices: the first one is a description of the Dhofar inscriptions, re-labelled South-eastern Arabian inscriptions in view of new findings in the Yemeni governorate of Mahra and the examination of epigraphic evidence from Soqotra. The second appendix contains a number of texts in Kuria Muria Jibbali/Shehret, ranging from a selection of Miranda Morris’s recordings from the 1980s to recordings proceeding from personal fieldwork made in 2017, with interlinear morpheme glossing. Finally, the third appendix contains a glossary of the above-mentioned Jibbali/Shehret variety. It is argued that Modern South Arabian studies are overall still in an incipient phase, and a research agenda is set up and proposed.