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The unique language of the Yemeni archipelago of Socotra is in danger of extinction

(Photo by Mira Baz)

First appeared in The Daily Star

HADIBU, Yemen: Lovers of Fairuz will be familiar with the nostalgia that pervades many of her songs for a past that has been slowly evolving and hybridizing, eventually to disappear. Although the nostalgia peddled by Fairuz revolves around Lebanese village life, the elderly people of Socotra might be feeling a similar emotion.

However, theirs is not just a longing for an older way of life, but also great fear for the future of their endangered language and cultural heritage.

“[Socotri] is endangered because it’s not written,” says ethnographer and linguist Miranda Morris, who’s been visiting the island since 1989.

The Socotri people speak a language, Socotri, or Saqatari as they call it, which has no written form.

It’s of a family of six languages known as the Modern South Arabian languages (MSA) that were widely spoken in southern Arabia for centuries, perhaps even for millennia, and have managed to survive in isolated areas in southern Yemen and southern Oman. These include Mahri, spoken in parts of Yemen’s Mahra governorate, near the Omani border, and a now-dead language called Bat’hari in Oman’s coastal Dhofar area. Other languages in southern Arabia disappeared as Islam was gradually adopted along with the language of the Koran, Arabic.

The MSA are part of the larger group of Semitic languages that includes Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic, spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea, which is the second-largest Semitic language after Arabic.

Socotri is one of several thousand oral languages that exist around the world without a script, which makes them vulnerable to extinction if their speakers adopt more dominant languages and cultures, as is happening in Socotra.

“Less than 20 percent of languages are written even today,” says Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. According to Anderson, all languages were oral before the development of writing four or five millennia ago.

The Living Tongues Institute recently launched the Enduring Voices Project with National Geographic to preserve the world’s threatened languages.

Little known outside of Yemen, Socotra Archipelago was granted World Heritage Status by UNESCO in 2008 for its biodiversity, particularly its “threatened species of outstanding universal value,” including species still unknown to scientists.

Socotra lies 350 kilometers south of the Yemeni coast. It has been called “The Galapagos of the Indian Ocean” for its high level of endemism – 42 percent of the flora of the Galapagos Islands famous for inspiring Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, is endemic, compared to Socotra’s nearly 35 percent. Its inhabitants number only around 70,000 of Yemen’s total population of 23 million.

Although Arabic and Socotri share many phonetic sounds, Socotri has letters that are unique to it, and which are difficult for beginners to learn. Each of the two languages is incomprehensible to speakers of the other unless it is learned, despite some similarities.

In a town east of Hadibu, the island’s capital, an elderly Socotri woman claims she never interacts with native Arabic speakers: She doesn’t speak or understand the language.

But the picture is rather different only 45 minutes away here in Hadibu, where Socotris
speak a mix of Arabic and Socotri, with Arabic usually dominating conversations.

“Our children do not know Socotri now,” says Ahmad Abdallah, 50, a Socotri poet. “If I give them an old word from our grandparents’ [time], something related to goat herding, for example, they don’t know what it means. Sometimes they can’t pronounce the right Socotri, so they use Arabic.”

Even the island’s main artistic expression, poetry, has been inter-penetrated with Arabic. Socotri poetry is usually sung and sometimes improvised. It was once a part of everyday life, but the spread of a conservative form of Islam has reduced its use. It’s said that in the past if poetry wasn’t heard from a house when someone passed it, they tried to find out what ill had befallen its residents. Now the island appears to have stopped singing.

“Singing was widespread,” says Fahd Kfayin, secretary general of The Heritage and History Association of Socotra. “When people fished they sang, when they herded, when they rode camels for long distances. There’s a song in every situation that fits with the environment
and with the movements of the activity.”

A Socotri living in the city says that his young daughter replaces the Socotri-specific letters with closely-related Arabic ones. He attributes this to the fact that she spends the majority of her days studying Arabic in school.

The daughter is emblematic of a significant and worrisome transformation, in one person’s lifetime, of a language that has survived the centuries. Many believe that the rapid development of the island, while mostly beneficial, has had a direct impact on its language.

This is especially true here in the capital, where all business is carried out in Arabic. Many business owners are from the Yemeni mainland and do not speak Socotri. The language of
instruction in schools is Arabic, with no Socotri component.

“It became necessary for Socotris to use Arabic to communicate with others.” explains
Kfayin.“The doctor, the teacher, the salesman, the police chief are not from Socotra, so Socotris are forced to use it [Arabic], and therefore have had to learn it.”

The problem is more widespread among those who are 30-years-old or younger. As more and more Socotris go to school or move from the mountainous areas to the capital, they increasingly speak Arabic as a sign of progress and prestige, abandoning Socotri altogether.

“Once the group in power is solidified and their written language enfranchised … [other smaller groups] may be devalued as dialects or unworthy of being written,” writes Anderson. “If such negative valuation from the socially dominant language group takes root, the language will likely be abandoned before it can be written. This is a typical scenario.”

Morris believes that, due to the absence of a state-led program to preserve Socotri, it’s at great risk of extinction. Socotri individuals who are aware of the danger are eagerly trying to create an alphabet to record the language in the face of the growing trend of the use of Arabic. But little else is being done.

International researchers, who arrive regularly on the island, are more interested in Socotra’s stunning natural resources. In the meantime, the Socotri language may be slowly disappearing, taking with it its unknown cultural wealth.

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