Two-thirds of ArabianBusiness.com readers think English should be adopted as an official language in GCC countries, our latest spot poll has revealed.
And of the 33% polled that believe English should not be adopted as an official language in the Gulf, less than a quarter think Arabic should be retained as the only official language.
Just 7% of respondents said English should be banned, while an overwhelming 93% believe English does have, at least, some place Gulf society.
A third of those surveyed believe that, while English should not be recognised as an official tongue, the Gulf “should continue to teach English for business use”.
Of those that believe English should be an official language, around 16% said that “we need to be 21st century and make English our first language, perhaps with Chinese our second”.
Results of the latest poll come less than one week after the UAE confirmed Arabic as the official language to be spoken in all government and federal departments and offices.
The move applauded by many experts who fear the cultural erosion of Arabic-speaking nations due to the influx of expatriate workers.
Ebtisam Al-Kitbi, professor of political science at UAE University was reported as saying the decision would “enhance the presence of Arab speaking people in the labour market and restore the national identity”.
“To my knowledge, there is no nation that allows an invasion of foreign languages in government institutions the way we did in the UAE. The move will correct the imbalance,” Al-Kitbi was quoted as saying.
“People [in other countries] use foreign languages, but you will never see them in the workplace other than their national languages. English is widely used in the government in the UAE and this is unacceptable.”
According to language research website Ethnologue, English is the second most widely spoken language and is used by 510 million people globally.
Mandarin is the first, with Hindi and Spanish the third and fourth most common languages with a total of 1.05 billion, 490 million and 420 million total speakers respectively.
Arabic is the fifith most common language, spoken in some form by around 230 million people around the world.
Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese and German round out the top ten.
The spot poll is based on the responses of ArabianBusiness.com readers accessing this site. The survey received 1021 responses in total.
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