Comments on: Ramadan Kareem! Or: Urban Etiquette for Monolinguals

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[…] I. (2009). Ramadan Kareem! Or: Urban Etiquette for Monolinguals. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/urban-etiquette-for-monolinguals/ Piller, I. (2017). Money makes the world go round. Language on the Move. […]

By: Selim Ben Said

Selim Ben Said — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:44:42 +0000

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 🙂