An Investigation into the Use of Endangered Languages in Different Domains in the Southern Society of Oman (Published)
This paper aims to investigate the languages used in various domains (different settings) in the southern society of Oman and explores the possibility to what extent these languages will be preserved in the future. A number of 40 people from different age groups from the southern Omani society were involved in this study who speak Arabic, Jibbali, and Mehri. Through using a questionnaire and following a thematic analysis, the findings revealed that found both Jibbali and Mehri are used in informal domains within most age groups. Some younger participants were found to already be shifting their language use towards Arabic, even with their family and friends, which is an indication of a gradual shift from these minority languages to Arabic in the southern community which are unlikely to be maintained. Based on these findings, it is recommended that the Omani government take proactive actions to protect minority languages in Oman as encouraging and enabling their use in classrooms, as well as by creating linguistic corpora of these languages that can be used as learning resources.
Citation: Al-Amri M. (2022) An Investigation into the Use of Endangered Languages in Different Domains in the Southern Society of Oman, International Journal of English Language and Linguistics Research, Vol.10, No 4, pp.19-32
Keywords: Arabic, Endangered languages, Jibbali, Mehri, Minority languages, Oman
Indo-Iranian Languages in Oman (Published)
The coexistence of a number of minority languages with Arabic language in Oman has recently been cited in literature. Distant from the latter Semitic language, the former belong to three main language families: Indo-Iranian languages, Modern South Asian languages and Bantu languages. Due to several factors such as speakers’ base, restricted domain of use and ineffective intergenerational transmission, they fall into different categories concerning their language vitality. The former language family (i.e. Indo-Iranian) includes several languages some of which are indigenous to Oman while others are spoken by other communities in some neighboring countries. The mainstream of these languages are associated with ethnic groups that identify with them as their ethnic languages whereas some are not categorically associated with certain ethnicities per se. This paper is an attempt to examine lexical resemblance among these languages using the Swadesh’s one hundred word list as its framework. Findings show that lexical resemblance is considerably high among these languages as the vast majority of the lexical items in the list formed one, two ,or three cognate groups in all or most languages as opposed to very few lexical items that happened to be so distinct in all languages under investigation that they did not form any cognate group of their own.
Keywords: Baluchi, Indo-Iranian, Kumzari, Lawati, Oman, Zadjali