Jarred Brewster

The minority language Śḥerɛ̄t, spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman, received no official recognition for over fifty years. Recently Oman announced plans to teach the country’s regional languages in public schools. This dissertation research captures Śḥerɛ̄t at a critical juncture, exploring language use and transmission across two novel sites, and elucidating the connections between political economy, social imaginaries, and language revitalization. The first of this project’s two sites explores the construction of a normative ideal Śḥerɛ̄t speaker in a second language classroom. In the second site, this study observes South Asian migrant herders, employed as wage laborers in the traditional camel herding economy who acquire the language in interaction with employers. This project emphasizes pastoralism as a uniquely robust and invocable context for Śḥerɛ̄t transmission and use and asks what insights the emergence of migrant new speakers, in the face language shift, can offer to scholars of language endangerment.