Soqotri

Soqotri is a Semitic language spoken by the Soqotri people on Socotra, an island off the coast of Yemen in the Arabian Sea. It is part of the Modern South Arabian languages, a branch of the South Semitic group within Afroasiatic. Soqotri is closely related to Mehri and Jibbali, among others, but it is not mutually intelligible with Arabic.

On Socotra and in diaspora communities in mainland Yemen and abroad, it is spoken by tens of thousands of native speakers; estimates range from around several tens of thousands to perhaps fifty thousand or more, with most speakers bilingual in Yemeni Arabic. The language is transmitted mainly in family and community contexts, and it has a strong oral tradition with everyday conversation, songs, and storytelling.

Linguistically, Soqotri shares many features with other Modern South Arabian languages, including root-and-pattern word formation and gender and number marking. It has its own phonological inventory and dialectal variation across the island, reflecting its long up-island linguistic history. The degree of mutual intelligibility with neighboring languages varies, and some features are distinctive enough to set Soqotri apart from Arabic.

There is no single standardized orthography. Soqotri has been described and documented by linguists since the 19th century; in modern usage it is commonly written with the Arabic script or represented in Latin transliteration in scholarly works. The language is considered endangered due to language shift toward Yemeni Arabic, especially among younger speakers, though there are ongoing efforts to document and, in some contexts, revitalize it.