Kumzari, the unknown lnaguage

For several intertwined reasons, Omanis as well as people in the Gulf States and other parts of the Arab World envision Kumzari as a tribe only, having nothing to do with its existence as a spoken language used by Kumzaris in their everyday communication. Here I take the chance to give a glimpse about Kumzari to familiarize the reader with this exotic language.

Background Information
Kumzari is one of several minority languages spoken in Oman such as Swahili, Harsosi, Bathari, Baluchi, Habyot, Mehri, and Jabali; most of which are named after the tribes speaking them as their mother tongues. These languages differ in the number of speakers and thus the degree of language endangerment. While some have been documented and given some linguistic exploration, others are left behind and not given their due linguistic exploration. Among these lesser-known languages is Kumzari spoken in a small village of Kumzar near the Strait of Hermuz in the northern part of Oman as well as in Khasab and other cities in the Musandam Peninsula. The following map shows the location in which Kumzari language is mainly spoken.
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[LEFT]Kumzari is named after the tribe of its speakers which is believed to be a sub-tribe of the Shihi tribe inhabiting the Musandam Peninsula in the far north of Oman. It is believed that several languages have contributed to the making of Kumzari; these are Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Urdu, Portuguese and Hindi. No clear evidence, however, is available to prove such assumption other than the borrowings taken from these languages especially the two main substratums of Kumzari - Arabic and Persian. Numerically, Kumzari is spoken by a few thousands speakers. Most of them inhabit the village of Kumzar, which is surrounded by mountains on three sides and the sea on the fourth side, making access to the village difficult other than by plane or sea. In the last two decades or so several Kumzari families have moved to the inland city of Khasab and other nearby cities within the Musandam Peninsula.


Genetic Affiliation

Although most of the minority languages spoken in Oman belong to the South Arabian Language group, Kumzari is a member of the 'Iranian' language group which itself branches from the Indo-Iranian family. The Indo-Iranian splits into: (1) Iranian languages such as Persian (Iran), Kurdish (Iraq), Baluchi (Pakistan), Pashto (Afghanistan), and Tajik (Tajikistan), to name but a few; and (2) the Indo-Aryan languages which are Hindi and its many related languages. The former also splits into eastern and western Iranian languages which go on and branch into southern and northern Iranian languages. The following is a family tree of the Iranian language group showing the distribution of the Iranian languages into different subgroups

Structurally, Kumzari is believed to be a cousin of (Modern) Persian, Lurish and Bakhtiari, each of which is descendent of Old Persian. Although Kumzari is an Iranian language resembling so much Persian of Iran, it has borrowed so many Arabic lexical items, approximating them to suit Kumzari phonology or importing them as they are originally used in Arabic. Such influx of borrowings from Arabic still continues these days due to the intense interaction between Arabic and Kumzari.

:509:I have a comment

Actually I don't agree with you when you said that [Kumzari is believed to be a cousin of (Modern) Persian, Lurish and Bakhtiari]
In fact we know that kumzari language shares superficial vocabularies with Persian, Lurish and Bakhtiari as a result of friction and contacting with them, but deep vocabularies which are the most important are pure Arabic. And I think that this evidence proves that Kumzari is an Arabic dialect originally.


Thank you

Thanks heaps for your comment, but you should have read the whole sentence. I said " Structurally, Kumzari is believed to be a cousin of (Modern) Persian, Lurish and Bakhtiari. I did not say 'lexically' and there is a whole big difference between the two words.
Second thing, these are facts based on academic studies not words out of my hat. It has been proved that Kumzari is one of the Iranian language group based on its structure despite the high percentage of Arabic words used in Kumzari.
True most of the vocab used in Kumzari are of Arabic origin, but in academic (linguistics )practices borrowings is not always evidence to show the origin of a certain language. So many languages have borrowed from other languages which belong to completely different language families. Take Persian for example. It has so many Arabic borrowings, but still Persian is a language of its own and it has nothing to do with sematic languages- the language family to which Arabic belongs. The same holds true for Japanese. It has borrowed so many lexical items from English and still both languages belong to different language families. The list goes on and on.
One more thing, Kumzari is not a dialect as you mentioned but rather a language of its own. Dialects are known to be mutually intelligible with other dialects of the same language, which does not apply to kumzari since speakers of other dialects of Arabic do not understand it. This proves that it is a language of its own not a dialect of Arabic.

Thanks again

These are the results of their studies and I respect them.

By the way, I used dialect according to the idea which contain that unwritten languages are called dialects not languages.

Thank you for clarification

No worries sister, any time.

Just one more thing, true that some people follow the idea that classifies unwritten languages as dialects, but I do not agree with this idea. I think such idea needs to be rethought. If a language is not written that does not necessarily mean it is not a language. There are about 6 to 7,000 languages in the world. Most of these languages are not written because they do not have an orthographic system, but still they are languages and we can not call them dialects because they are not written. If people speaking other languages can not comprehend a certain language, then we can not call it a dialect- even if it is unwritten- because still it is a new language to them. Most languages of the world are spoken (unwritten) languages, and still they are categorized as languages .

Thanks for stepping by.

To be honest, I don't have enough information in this area.
It is clear that you are well versed in this subject "Masha'a Allah".

I enjoyed your topic.


Thank you again

No worries sister, you're most welcome anytime.

hmmmm... In my opinion I do not really think the Kimzaris is language because there is no grammar in it. However no one can understand it even write it