The Formation of Jibbali Perfect and Imperfect Passive

Abstract

Jibbali belongs to the Modern South Arabian language group which also includes Mehri, Soqotri, Hobyot, Harsusi and Bathari. This group belongs to the South Semitic Branch that includes the Ethiopic group and Old South Arabian Epigraphic group that includes Sabaean, Minaean, Qatabanian and Hadrami.

This paper describes the perfect and imperfect passive formation in Jibbali which is regarded as one of the endangered Modern South Arabian languages that have not yet been adequately described and documented. It first describes the Jibbali perfective passive which is formed nonconcatenatively showing all it common patterns, then it describes the Jibbali imperfective passive which is found to be formed concatenatively through affixation. The original contribution in this paper is the introduction and analysis of new data related to the formation of Jibbali passive. The paper follows a descriptive method, therefore, showing no argumentation. The data were chiefly collected in 2010 from purposely-chosen Jibbali  male and female native speakers (four females and four males) studying at Hadhramout University. The ages of these informants vary twenty to twenty three years.