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- Shehri - frequently called Jibbali (or "mountain" language) in Omani Arabic - is a South Arabian (or Eastern South Semitic) language spoken by a minority native non-Arab population in the mountains and wilderness areas upland from Salalah in Dhofar Province in the southwest of the Oman. While sometimes confused as a dialect of Arabic even by Omani Arabs, Shehri belongs to another branch of the Semitic languages. It had an estimated 25,000 speakers in the 1993 census and is best known as the language of the Dhofari rebels during the Dhofar Rebellion along the country’s border with Marxist South Yemen in the 1970s. Alternative names/spellings for the language are: Geblet, Sheret, Sehri, Shahari, Jibali, Jibbali, Ehkili, Qarawi. Shehri is spoken along a dialect continuum that includes Western Jibbali, Central Jibbali, and Eastern Jibbali, which includes 'Baby' Jibbali spoken in Al-Hallaniyah in the Khuriya Muriya Islands. Like most Modern South Arabian dialect speakers in Oman and Yemen, many Shehri speakers, especially men, are bilingual in higher-status local dialects of Arabic, especially the Dhofari dialect. In addition, it is primarily a spoken language, and native speakers are normally not literate in it. All this has implications for the long-term survival of the language, although currently Jibbali pride and sense of separateness has contributed to a strengthening of speakers’ attachment to their minority language. The population of Oman is highly tribalized socially, whether Jibbali or Arab, and Shehri speakers, too, are divided into non-Arab tribes such as the Qara (also called Ehkeló, Ahkló),and Arabs such as Shahra (Sheró, Shahara), Barahama, Bait Ash-Shaik, and Batahira. (Ref. SIL Ethnologue online)
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