Arabic for Travel, Work and Study

In Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha English is the working language of daily life: most shop staff, drivers and waiters come from South Asia, the Philippines or Africa, and English is what they share with their customers, so a visitor can spend a week there without a word of Arabic. Egypt's tourist circuit — the hotels, Nile cruise boats, bazaars and sites of Cairo, Luxor and Aswan — handles English well, and so does Jordan, from Amman to Petra and Wadi Rum. In Morocco and Tunisia the second language is French, with English growing among the young and in tourism. Saudi Arabia and Oman offer less outside hotels, airports and malls, and in every country the village shop, the local minibus, the pharmacy counter and the taxi rank beyond the tourist zone run in Arabic.

Two weeks of daily practice buy the greeting exchange, the courtesy words, numbers, ordering and asking the way; they do not buy following the reply, which may come in a dialect you did not study. The script is a decision of its own: 28 letters, most of which change shape with their position in the word, written right to left, with the short vowels usually left out. A week or two makes the letters readable slowly, and that pays off on signs, menus and the fronts of buses. Numbers run left to right. Egypt and the Levant write them with the Eastern Arabic digits, in which five is a small circle and zero a dot; the Maghreb and much of the Gulf use the Western digits familiar from English, often printed beside the Eastern ones.

Register comes before vocabulary. Every exchange starts with a greeting, answered in kind: “as-salāmu ʿalaykum” gets “wa ʿalaykum as-salām”, “ṣabāḥ al-khayr” gets “ṣabāḥ an-nūr”, and questions about health and family come before business, even at a shop counter. A man of some standing is “ustādh”, an older man “ḥajj”; in Egypt a foreign woman is often “madame”, and across the region parents are called “abu” or “umm” with the name of their eldest son. Tea or coffee offered in a shop or a home is accepted, a first cup at least, and food, money and gifts pass with the right hand. “Inshāʾallāh”, God willing, attaches to anything in the future, from tomorrow's meeting to a bus that may or may not come; “al-ḥamdu lillāh” answers “how are you” and closes a meal; “yallā” means let's go, or hurry up.

• The article al-: The definite article is written joined to the next word and often melts into it in speech: “al-shams”, the sun, is said “ash-shams”, which is why maps write the article “Al”, “El”, “Ar-” or “Ash-” depending on the word it meets.
• Ḥabībi: “My dear” is everyday friendliness between men and from a shopkeeper to a male customer, with no romantic weight; addressed to a woman stranger it is out of place.
• Khalāṣ: “Enough”, “done”, “that's it”: it closes a haggle, a meal or a discussion, and said firmly it is a clear no.
• Bakshīsh in Egypt: Small services in Egypt — a porter, a guard who unlocks a tomb, a toilet attendant, the person who points out a view — come with the expectation of a tip, called “bakshīsh”; small notes kept apart from the wallet make it easy.

Arabic is the language of government, the courts and most local business in the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan and the Maghreb: ministries, documents filed with the authorities, labour contracts and dealings with local firms. In Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha and much of Riyadh's private sector, English is the working language of multinationals, banks, consultancies and hospitals, and a whole career can run in it, while official paperwork goes through a translator or the company's government-relations staff. In Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria French carries much of business, banking and engineering, Arabic the administration, and English is gaining ground.

Titles matter. “Duktūr” goes to physicians and to anyone with a doctorate, “muhandis” to an engineer, and “shaykh” to members of the Gulf ruling families and to tribal and religious figures where it applies; in the Gulf the title is followed by the first name. A full name strings together the given name, the father's name, often the grandfather's and a family name. Business cards are printed in English on one side and Arabic on the other. Meetings open with coffee or tea and talk of family and travel before the agenda, and a first meeting may never reach it. Friday is the weekly day of rest: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Oman and Algeria take Friday and Saturday off, the UAE, Morocco and Tunisia keep a Saturday–Sunday weekend, and working hours shorten during Ramadan.

Private employers in the Gulf rarely require Arabic and count it as an advantage, from sales and hospitality to real estate. It becomes a requirement for government posts, journalism, NGOs and humanitarian work, law and translation, and for most roles in local firms in Egypt, Jordan and the Maghreb. Where a job ad names a level, it is usually professional working proficiency, B2 or above, and it is tested in an interview held in Arabic rather than by a certificate.

Universities across the region teach the humanities, law, Arabic literature and religious studies in Arabic, and medicine, engineering, the sciences and business often in English, or in French in the Maghreb. Cairo University follows that split, while the American University in Cairo teaches in English. The University of Jordan, King Saud University in Riyadh and Qatar University run Arabic-taught faculties beside English-taught ones, and Mohammed V University in Rabat teaches in Arabic and French. Al-Azhar in Cairo, the reference for Islamic studies, teaches in Arabic and runs its own Arabic courses for international students before they join a faculty.

A degree taught in Arabic expects the student to read unvowelled academic prose, close to C1, and universities usually check it with their own placement exam rather than an outside certificate. Exchange students mostly take English-taught courses alongside an Arabic course at the host university, and many arrive through their home university's exchange agreement or a funded summer programme rather than enrolling directly.

A language course can itself be the purpose of the stay. The American University in Cairo's Department of Arabic Language Instruction teaches Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian colloquial Arabic from beginner to advanced; the University of Jordan's Language Center does the same in Amman; the Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes in Tunis teaches MSA and Tunisian Arabic in term-length and summer sessions; the Sultan Qaboos College for Teaching Arabic to Non-Native Speakers in Manah brings students to Oman; and Rabat has a cluster of private institutes. The UAE's student visa covers academic programmes and language courses, and Tunisia's covers full-time study at its universities, among them the University of Tunis El Manar, to which the Bourguiba institute belongs.

Universities and employers in the region rarely ask for a certificate: they interview, or set their own placement test. A certificate counts mostly outside the region — for a government post, a graduate programme, a teaching job or a CV. The choice follows the reader of the result. A European employer or university reads the CIMA's CEFR level directly; US government agencies and universities work with the ACTFL ratings; the Hamza test is backed by a Saudi national academy and aimed at study and work. All of them test Modern Standard Arabic, not a dialect.

The CEFR mapping comes from each body's own scale: the CIMA awards the CEFR level itself, from A1 to C2; the ALPT reports a level its publisher maps to the CEFR; the Hamza test covers A2 to C1; the ACTFL tests use the ACTFL scale from Novice to Superior, which has its own published correspondence to the CEFR.

A level takes years rather than months. The US Foreign Service Institute places Arabic in its hardest group for English speakers, at around 2,200 classroom hours to professional working proficiency. The script comes in weeks, A2 is a realistic target for a first year of regular classes, and B2 takes several years of steady study, longer when a dialect is learned alongside.

The CIMA is taken at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris and at partner centres in France and abroad; the ALPT on a computer or on paper through the Arab Academy; the Hamza test at approved centres or remotely under supervision; the ACTFL tests on demand through Language Testing International, the interview by phone or video.

Visas and residence permits in the region do not ask for an Arabic level. Nationality is where Arabic is tested: the naturalisation rules of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar both list knowledge of Arabic among their conditions, beside long years of residence.

Arabic self-study needs a way into the root system. Most words grow from three consonants — k-t-b gives book, writer, office and library — and Hans Wehr orders its entries by root, so looking up one word shows its whole family; Almaany is faster for a single word and shows the vowels the text leaves out. A course book gives the grammar an order: Al-Kitaab for a university-style course in MSA with a dialect alongside, the Madinah Arabic books for grammar step by step. Words go into Anki with a sentence and, from the start, in Arabic script rather than transliteration.

The dialect comes from listening. Lingualism's books with audio cover one dialect each, from Moroccan to Gulf; Easy Arabic films unscripted conversations in the streets of Egypt, Palestine and Tunisia; Al Jazeera's learning site builds MSA lessons from real news reports once the script is familiar.

No tool hears a ʿayn you say as a plain vowel, or tells you that a Levantine phrase sounds odd in Cairo.

Arabic rewards a tutor more than most languages because its hardest parts are heard, not read: sounds that English lacks, a dialect that books cover only in part, and text that leaves out its vowels. Half an hour a few times a week with someone who stops you at a flattened ḥāʾ or a Cairo word used in Amman does what no recording can.

Treat the trial lesson as an interview. Ask which dialect the tutor speaks natively and whether they teach it or only fuṣḥā; whether the script starts in the first lesson or after a phase in transliteration; which course book they build on; how they correct pronunciation; and, for an exam, whether they have prepared candidates for the CIMA or an ACTFL interview.