Yemen Culture & Language

Yemeni culture is the oldest continuously settled in Arabia, and its most immediate expression is how Yemenis build.

The tower house

At Shibam, houses of unbaked mud brick rise five to eleven storeys, packed inside a wall against flood and raid, and have stood since the sixteenth century — a form of vertical planning centuries before anywhere else attempted it. In Old Sanaa the towers are of stone and fired brick, banded and framed in white gypsum, with fanlights of coloured glass set in alabaster tracery that turn the rooms red and blue at sunset. Both are UNESCO-listed.

Coffee

Coffee was first cultivated commercially in the Yemeni highlands and exported through the port of Mocha, which is where the word comes from. Yemeni beans are still prized and the terraces still produce, though qat has displaced much of the crop.

Craft

Silverwork, much of it historically by Yemeni Jewish craftsmen, jambiya making, indigo dyeing on the Tihama, and basketry.

Poetry and song

The sung poetry of Sanaa, accompanied on the qanbus lute, is UNESCO-listed, and improvised verse duels are a live tradition.

The Jewish community

Yemen held one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, present for well over two thousand years, with its own liturgy, Hebrew pronunciation and a near-monopoly on the country’s silverwork and jewellery. Almost the entire community left for Israel between 1949 and 1950, and only a handful of people remained by the 2020s — but the silver filigree in any Yemeni collection, and a good deal of the craft vocabulary, comes from them.

Food

Saltah with fenugreek froth, mandi and haneeth slow-cooked in pit ovens, flatbread from a clay oven, and honey from Wadi Dawan that is among the most expensive in the world.

Arabic is the official language, in Yemeni dialects that are among the most conservative in the Arab world and retain features lost elsewhere — which is why they interest linguists.

Socotri, spoken on the island, is not a dialect of Arabic at all. It is a Modern South Arabian language, a separate branch of the Semitic family with no written tradition, related to Mehri and Jibbali on the Omani and Yemeni mainland. It is spoken by perhaps a few tens of thousands of people and is considered endangered.

English is spoken by guides, some educated Yemenis and in the small tourism trade on Socotra, and very little elsewhere.

Useful Arabic: as-salamu alaykum as a greeting, shukran for thank you, min fadlak for please, and kayf halak for how are you.