Recent developments in Jibbali

Jibbali, a semitic language of Oman, has undergone a number of significant changes in the last forty years. One clear change has been the increase in the influence of Arabic on the lexicon, which is unsurprising, given the social and educational changes that have swept Oman since 1970. There have also been internal changes, however, some simply due to phonetic erosion, but some due to levelling and other kinds of analogy. The morphological changes - perhaps accelerated by imperfect language learning - are especially interesting, and also illustrate what kinds of morphology can be lost in just one or two generations.