An Omani Evolving Lexicon: From Carl Reinhardt (1894) to the Present Day

Oman is a country in constant evolution linguistically, economically and socially. Most of the linguistic studies carried out so far in the Sultanate are located in specific areas of the country and date back to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.Carl Reinhardt’s work – Ein arabischer Dialekt gesprochen in ‘Oman und Zanzibar, dated 1894 – is one of the most detailed and richest descriptions of Omani Arabic, specifically of the grammar, including the phonology and morphology, of the Banū Kharūṣ vernacular, spoken in the area of Nizwa and Rustāq (northern Oman), but also among the élite of Zanzibar island. The main purpose of his work was to provide a valuable linguistic guide to the German soldiers quartered on the island and in the Tanganyka region, which were an imperial German colony for a short time. The material supplied by Reinhardt still plays an absolutely essential role for neo-Arabic linguistics and dialectology, although it has some significant issues, such as the lack of Arabic original script and of a comprehensive glossary.Reinhardt’s lexical data, nevertheless, is extremely rich and characterized by some specific traits which make this vernacular different from any other Southern Arabic dialect. In this paper, I will try to outline this richness of Omani lexicon, starting from some examples in Reinhardt’s nineteenth-century core and exploring the variety and changes they underwent over time. These examples will be presented for specific semantic categories (e.g. body parts, food, animals), following the same format as that of the Behnstedt and Woidich's Word Atlas of Arabic dialects / Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte (2011). Furthermore, a group of specific variations between the original meaning of a root and its different use in the Banū Kharūṣ vernacular, and a few borrowings from foreign languages will be presented and analysed.