The Fade of Arabic Among Today’s Levantine Youth Living in the Gulf
I was sitting with my family when someone said a phrase that should have felt familiar.
“Tikram Aynik.” Do it for my sake, literally may your eyes be honored. Everyone nodded
like it was nothing. I froze. I understood the sentence but not the weight of it. I smiled, stayed
quiet, and later that night I searched it up. It turned out to be one of the most common Syrian
phrases, something warm and generous, something people say without thinking. The fact that
I had to look it up stayed with me longer than the definition. That moment made me realize
how much of my own language I recognize but do not actually carry. I also realized that now
I do not even know how to respond to those words. I know what they mean but I do not have
the instinct, the automatic reaction that should come.
Growing up in the Gulf as someone from the Levant means learning very early how to
translate yourself. Arabic is always around but English is what runs your life. School is in
English. Exams are in English. University applications, group chats, future plans, even the
way you explain yourself to friends all happen in English. Arabic exists but it exists carefully.
It becomes the language of greetings, short answers, respect. Not the language of long
thoughts or complicated feelings. Without anyone ever telling you the change, you learn that
English is where you feel confident and Arabic is where you hesitate. And now moments like
Tikram Aynik are confusing. You hear it and you want to respond but you do not know how
in the way that you should.
This change is not random. Academic research on language and bilingualism in the Gulf
shows that many students are educated mainly in English with Arabic limited to only a few
hours a week. According to a 2017 Arab Youth Survey, 60 percent of young people agreed
with the statement “the Arabic language is losing its value,” and 36 percent said they use
English more than Arabic on a daily basis. The same research found that in the Gulf region,
more than half reported that English had overtaken Arabic as their primary spoken language,
a pattern that reflects what many families experience at home. These trends show that
knowing English feels like a ticket to opportunity and social mobility while Arabic feels like
something traditional but less immediately necessary. Nearly half of Levantine students in
Gulf settings report difficulty using Arabic in complex conversations even though they can
follow normal dialogue and keep up with everyday speech. This means you can understand
what people are saying but when you try to respond you hesitate or simplify your words.
What we end up with is a generation that can follow conversations easily but struggles to
respond with richness. Vocabulary feels limited. Expressing abstract or emotional ideas feels
heavy. The moment a thought becomes personal English steps in. It feels faster, cleaner, less
risky. Arabic on the other hand feels loaded. Every mistake feels louder.
I spoke to Seryana Hilal, a sixteen year old Syrian student who has lived in the Gulf most of
her life. She told me she usually realizes what she is missing only after the moment passes.
She said, “Once in class a teacher used a word I did not know and I had to search it later. It
was not a rare word. It was just a word I never needed before because I never used Arabic
like that.” She hesitated a moment and then added, “What bothered me most was not the
word itself but how it made me feel. I felt like I was behind in something I was supposed to
already have.” At school she uses English for everything, presentations, essays, and group
discussions. She said Arabic is for greetings and short responses and if a conversation gets
emotional or complicated she switches to English immediately.
Experts see patterns like this not just in surveys but in real language use. Dr Reem Razem, an
assistant professor of anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology in Dubai, has studied
how language shifts in bilingual families and how English seems to become dominant at
home even when Arabic is the heritage language. She said in an interview with Khaleeji
Times, “When we were confined to our homes during the pandemic I began to wonder why
my boys spoke in English to each other and sometimes responded in English when I
addressed them in Arabic.” “When I filmed their conversations I found that 30 to 40 percent
of what they said to each other was in English even though at home conversations with adults
were mostly in Arabic,” she explained, showing how English becomes the comfortable norm
for youth.
Education plays a huge role in this gap. In many schools Arabic is treated like a subject rather
than a living language. Classical Arabic feels distant from everyday speech. Dialects feel
unofficial and sometimes are even discouraged. Students memorize rules but rarely build
comfort or confidence. Research on language learning shows that emotional engagement is
critical for fluency. When language becomes only exams and worksheets students may pass
academically while still feeling disconnected from the language itself.
There is also social pressure that makes things worse. Levantine youth in the Gulf are often
expected to be fluent automatically. When they are not, the disappointment feels cultural not
academic. This creates anxiety and anxiety leads to avoidance. People stop writing in Arabic.
They stop speaking it unless necessary. Over time the language shrinks to what feels safe.
Ironically that avoidance is exactly what accelerates the loss.
This shift affects families in quiet ways. Parents remember, argue, and express emotion in
Arabic. Children respond in English or in simplified Arabic. Conversations get shorter.
Stories lose detail. When elders use phrases full of cultural meaning the younger generation
understands the idea but not always the feeling behind it. The connection remains but it is
thinner filtered through translation.
The strongest trend here is not rejection of Arabic but displacement. English becomes the
language of adulthood, ambition, and clarity. Arabic becomes the language of identity,
expectation, and guilt. Young Levantines know where they come from but cannot always
speak from that place. They feel culturally close but linguistically distant.
This matters because language shapes how people process memory, emotion, and belonging.
Arabic carries humor, tenderness, sarcasm, and cultural shortcuts that do not translate cleanly.
When young people lose easy access to those layers they lose a kind of emotional fluency.
They can explain what happened but not always how it felt.
Arabic in the Gulf is not disappearing loudly. It is fading quietly in homes where English
feels more efficient, in schools where Arabic feels like a test, and in moments where
switching languages feels easier than struggling. Many Levantine youth will likely return to
Arabic later intentionally aware of what was lost. But it will no longer feel instinctive. It will
feel intentional rebuilt rather than inherited.
Language loss does not look like silence. It looks like knowing exactly what you want to say
and realizing too late that you do not know how to say it in the language that was supposed to
know you first. And now when someone says Tikram Aynik I pause because I do not know
what to say the way I should.
Dr. Reem Razem, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at RIT Dubai, whose research on family
language policy reveals how English becomes dominant in bilingual households even when Arabic is
the heritage language.
