A Typology of Fish Names in Kumzari

In contrast to the desolate environments that characterize much of the Arabia’s surface, the surrounding waters are home to a high level of biological diversity, including hundreds of species of fish. This is particularly true of the seas around the Musandam Peninsula of far north-eastern Arabia, where shallow gulf waters give way to open ocean. This chapter provides an inventory, description and analysis of fish names in Kumzari, an endangered language spoken in a handful of towns and city neighbourhoods in the wider region. The scope of fish as a semantic category is first delimited, followed by comments on the defining and labelling of fish species. The central section of the article proposes a typology of Kumzari fish names based on factors including association with other species, descriptions of their physical appearance and other, more complex kinds of descriptive labels. The article closes with reflection on fish names in their wider linguistic context: structural characteristics, use of fish names elsewhere in the lexicon, and the relevance of fish names for understanding the history of the Kumzari language. An explanatory lexicon of the 198 fish names in the data is provided as an appendix.