Is Arabic under threat on the Arabian peninsula?

Editor’s note: UNESCO has declared December 18 as World Arabic Language Day. Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It has around 400 million speakers and is an official language in 24 countries. Even so, the Arabic language is the persistent object of language panics, including fear for its very survival.

In this post, Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi (Department of English Literature & Linguistics, Qatar University) examine the specific form this language panic takes in the Gulf countries, where Arabic is in close contact both with the languages of labor migrants from South and South-East Asia and with English as the language of globalization.

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Rizwan Ahmad and Shaikha Al-Hemaidi
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Is Arabic under threat in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries of Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, and the UAE, where the number of non-nationals exceeds the nationals? Do non-Arabs living in the GCC pose a threat to the Arabic language and Arab identity? These questions have been the subject of debates not only in the Arabic language media but also conferences and seminars. Since Arabic is a symbol of national identity in the GCC, it is understandable why Arabs may be concerned, but beyond the emotional rhetoric, do facts support the anxiety about the decline of Arabic?

Demographic changes after discovery of oil in GCC

The GCC countries have experienced an influx of migrant workers over the past few decades following the discovery of oil and gas. The massive economic and social projects undertaken by the GCC governments have further created needs for labor and skills that the local population cannot fulfil leading to reliance on temporary foreign labor. In the GCC, non-nationals outnumber the nationals, accounting for 52% of the total population. In the workforces, the percentage of non-nationals is even more pronounced reaching up to 95% in Qatar. While migration into the GCC has brought many benefits to the region, it has also given rise to concerns among the local population that the Arabic language and Arab identity are in danger.

Fear of decline of Arabic

In popular discussions, the perceived decline of Arabic is generally attributed to two factors. First, it is argued that the presence of non-Arab migrant population from South and Southeast Asia not only poses a threat to the structure and use of Arabic but also endangers the Arab identity of the youth. Al-Farajānī, a political thinker and a columnist, in an article published on Aljazeera in 2008 argued that the presence of Asians had negative cultural consequences, the most important of which is ifsād al-lughah al-‘Arabīyyah, ‘corruption of the Arabic language’.

In 2013, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Center for Language Planning and Policies, based in Saudi Arabia, organized a conference aimed at developing strategies to strengthen the Arabic language and identity against the backdrop of social, demographic, and economic changes in the GCC. On a panel, Dr. Lateefah Al-Najjar, a professor of Arabic at UAE University, presented a paper on the effects of the Asian workforce on the Arabic language in which she argued that Asian maids and drivers affect the language of children and recommended that the Asian workforce be replaced with Arabs and that the learning of Arabic be a condition of employment in the GCC.

A second source of anxiety comes from the presence of numerous English-medium schools and colleges in the region. In a report published in 2019 on the occasion of UN Arabic Language Day – celebrated annually on December 18 – it was argued that English was a threat to Arabic in the GCC in the same way as French endangers Arabic in Arabic-speaking countries in North Africa. According to another report published in the Economist, in 2022, the youth in the GCC uses English more than Arabic and the use of Arabic is becoming limited to the home domain.

Some scholarly studies have also argued that English medium schools and colleges in the GCC are a threat to Arabic and Arab identity. A similar fear of the decline of Arabic in the entire Arab World was the theme of a Pan-Arab conference entitled “The Arabic language is in danger: We are all partners in protecting it” held in the UAE in 2013 indicating that the purported decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC.

Language policy changes in the GCC

The presence of large non-Arab populations has also led to communication problems between monolingual Arabs and non-Arabs. The governments of Qatar and UAE have started to use migrant languages in dealing with issues related to the workforce. At the same time, the concerns about the decline of Arabic have led the countries in the region, especially Qatar and UAE, with the largest foreign populations, to take measures aimed at protecting the Arabic language and identity. In the UAE, the Cabinet passed Resolution Number 21/2 in 2008 whereby all ministries, federal entities, and local government departments were required to use Arabic in all their official communications. In 2015, the Department of Economic Development of Dubai in the UAE issued violation tickets to 29 restaurants for not having their menus in Arabic in addition to not specifying the prices. Similarly, in 2019, Qatar passed the Law on Protection of the Arabic Language which regulates the use of Arabic and foreign languages and provides a fine up to 50,000 Qatari Riyal in case of non-compliance in some cases.

Language decline as proxy for social and political crises

A major shortcoming of the above reports, studies, and conferences is that no concrete evidence was provided to support the purported decline of Arabic. There is no linguistic evidence that Arabic spoken by young people in the GCC shows linguistic influences of their maids and drivers. They may have acquired some words, phrases, and sentences from their languages to communicate with them, which only suggests that their linguistic repertoire has been expanded. In fact, maids and drivers learn to communicate in Arabic with proficiency ranging from broken pidgin Arabic to native-like command. There is a need of systematic research based on empirical data to understand the linguistic effects of maids and drivers on the languages of host society.

Moreover, the discourse of the decline of Arabic is not limited to the GCC but covers the entire Arab World, as was the theme of the 2013 conference in the UAE. Yasir Suleiman, a sociolinguist who has written extensively on the Arabic language and identity describes the situation as one of language anxiety, which is less about language and more about social and political tensions and crises besetting the Arab world.

One major external factor that contributes to the anxiety is the presence of English in educational institutions. Another is the demographic changes that the discovery of oil and the massive modernization projects have brought to the GCC countries whereby non-nationals constitute a significant part of the Gulf social and cultural space. Suleiman argues that the discourse of decline of Arabic is a proxy for these social tensions whereby a defense of Arabic becomes a defense of the Arab social and moral order.

The issue of anxiety and fear notwithstanding, something concrete has appeared in the linguistic landscape of the GCC, and maybe even more broadly in the Arab World, which is that for the first time in their history, Arabs are becoming bilingual in their dialect and English.

Before the advent of English-medium international schools and universities, Arabs from the region would seek higher education in other Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria, where the medium of instruction was Arabic. Their level of education would be displayed in their knowledge and use of Standard Arabic.

By contrast, many GCC students today graduate from English-medium schools and international universities in Qatar and the UAE with a better command of English than Standard Arabic, especially in discussing professional issues.

This is part of the anxiety that English is encroaching upon the space of Arabic. However, we know bilingual people can command two languages equally proficiently and use each in its appropriate context. More research is needed to better understand usage patterns at home and in professional spaces. Census data, similar to those collected in bilingual Quebec in Canada could shed empirical light on what language(s) people use in different social domains such as the home, the workplace, or social gathering such as majlis. This might be more productive than the fear about the decline of Arabic that currently prevails.