Skip to main content
Language learning

Ramadan Kareem! Or: Urban Etiquette for Monolinguals

By October 11, 2009June 2nd, 20192 Comments3 min read6,616 views

Muslims around the world were celebrating the holy month of Ramadan recently and the greeting de jour here in Abu Dhabi was Ramadan Kareem!, which literally translates as “Ramadan is generous.” Ramadan Kareem! is one of the many Arabic expressions that the vast majority of Abu Dhabi residents use in their English. Some of my personal favorites include yanni (“you know”), yallah (“come on, let’s go, just do it”), chalas (“finished, over, done”), Inshallah (“God willing”), al-hamdulillah (“Thank God”), Mashallah (“Congratulations!” literally “God’s gift/will/blessing”) and, of course, shokran (“Thank you!”).

According to the CIA World Fact Book, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is the country in the world with the highest immigration rate: around 19% of the population are Emirati nationals and everyone else here is an immigrant. Around 50% of the population are South East Asians, 23% are Arabs and Iranians, and 8% come from elsewhere. With these kinds of population statistics it is hardly surprising that Abu Dhabi is a very multilingual place and pretty much everyone learns to speak bits and pieces of other languages. In their book chapter about “Teen life in the United Arab Emirates”, the authors write that all young people in this country grow up bi- or multilingual “except the children of Western expatriates who remain monolingual” (p. 239). I find that very puzzling – not the statement, but the actual fact. I have no doubts that the observation itself is correct – many of my American, Australian and British acquaintances who have raised children in Abu Dhabi or Dubai confirm that their children haven’t learnt Arabic (nor any other language). It’s the fact itself that I find puzzling.

So, here is a research challenge: much has been written about how people learn second or additional languages but has anyone ever researched how some people manage to not learn other languages despite being surrounded by them? If there’s any budding sociolinguist in search of a PhD project out there: “Not learning to speak another language:” an ethnographic study of Western expatriates’ language trajectories in the UAE (or any other multilingual context of your choice)” is a PhD study I’d love to supervise.

In the meantime, I wouldn’t be worth my salt if I didn’t have some preliminary observations to offer. It all seems to start with willfully ignoring the existence of languages other than English. Many English speakers tell me “no one here speaks Arabic.” Hello?! Around 40% of the population of the UAE (see above) are native Arabic speakers. Surely, that’s not exactly a negligible quantity. And how can you overlook all those Arabic (and English, i.e. bilingual) streets signs and billboards and ads and other signage in the public space?

If I point out any of those, then I get the response “oh yeah, but everybody speaks English.” That is certainly true (to various degrees) but – seeing that all these people around the world make an effort to speak English, why is it that monolingual English speakers (and, I hasten to add, the monolinguals of some other languages) find it so hard to extend the same courtesy to speakers of other languages? So, I declare that greetings, congratulations, apologies, and thank-yous in the language of the person you are speaking to are de rigueur for any self-respecting contemporary urbanite!

And, in my experience, starting with those everyday expressions is the first step to learning how to speak another language: fake it till you make it!

References

Caesar, J., & Badry, F. (2003). United Arab Emirates. In A. A. Mahdī (Ed.), Teen life in the Middle East (pp. 229-246). Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press.

Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

More posts by Ingrid Piller

Join the discussion 2 Comments

  • This is quite interesting, while I am not myself familiar with the linguistic context of the UAE, I think that the reason why ‘expats’ fail to learn the Arabic language (even though I am sure many try very hard) is that English plays the role of a ‘Lingua Franca’ or language of convenience, which helps the foreign population to communicate. In addition – I believe expats living in educational settings such as Universities will almost never have the opportunity to speak Arabic since they live in communities where the population is composed of people from either similar or different countries, but almost never an exclusively Arabic-speaking population. The street signs add another level of complexity because even though English may not an official language when compared to Arabic, it has a kind of de-facto official status by being there on the signs. I think you are quite right when you say that the UAE is an amazing multilingual country 🙂

Leave a Reply