Part of the issue with defining Himyaritic is that the term itself is a catch-all term used by Arab grammarians after the Arabization of the Yemeni highlands and in reality could represent a number of speech varieties belonging to the Sayhadic branch of Central Semitic, meaning that ultimately determining the "
distribution" of said language could be misleading. As suggested by Peter Stein, the language of the Himyarites may have been no different than that of neighboring Sabaic-speaking peoples and thus what is documented in works such as
al-Hamdani's
al-Iklīl may in fact be the mixed speech of individuals who speak early varieties of Arabic with influence from spoken Sayhadic languages of the time. Stein points out that the few supposed examples of Himyaritic lay outside of the Himyarite heartland and instead in areas that are historically Sabaic speaking, with Qāniya and Ja 2353 being written in an area that historically used the Radmanite dialect of Sabaic and ZI 11 coming from Mārib, the historical center of the Sabaic language and Sabaean state. As noted by Alessandra Avanzini the problem with suggesting that the Himyarites had their own distinct language to begin with is that personal correspondences from that era of South Arabian history are still in Sabaic and that Robin's suggestion that Sabaic was supplanted by this supposed Himyarite language at this point are unsupported by this being that it is unlikely that personal correspondences would be in a dead language. It has been suggested that the languages of the Yemeni highlands were not outright replaced by Arabic but instead, because of their close relation to it, the speech varieties gradually became "
Arabized" into being considered what Arabists could consider to be Arabic, adding to Stein's point that "
Himyaritic" as known to al-Hamdani in specific may have in reality been Arabized Sayhadic speech varieties or a group of varieties of Arabic that had a strong Sayhadic substrate. Restö (2000:115) goes as far as suggesting that even in the modern day a similar dynamic may exist for the so-called k-dialects of highland Yemen where "
all other elements connecting them with other Arabic dialects are borrowings" and in reality they may be surviving Sayhadic speech varieties. Works such as al-Hamdani's
Ṣifat Jazīrat al-Arab do not portray an objective description of the speech varieties and their features but instead give a view into how language was taken into account regarding the ranking at which al-Hamdani considered different peoples, social classes, and so forth. Much of what al-Hamdani notes as /ʃajʔun mina l-taħmir/ (
an element of Himyaritic) are instead irregularities in spoken Arabic that he could not attribute to Classical Arabic and his description of /ʔal-ħimjarijja ʔal-quħħa ʔal-mutaʔaqqida/ (
pure, incomprehensible Himyaritic) in some parts of the historic territory of the Himyarite confederacy may actually be describing any remnant speech communities using Sayhadic languages; albeit if they were Sabaic or any other it would not matter given that anything non-Arab and distinctive to the area at the time was simply "
Himyaritic". == Linguistic features ==