United Arab Emirates Culture & Language

Two cultures run in parallel here: an Emirati one with deep roots and a small number of people, and an expatriate one that is enormous, transient and drawn from a hundred countries. They overlap less than visitors expect.

Hospitality as obligation

Arabic coffee — gahwa, pale, cardamom-heavy, poured from a dallah into small handleless cups — served with dates is the formal greeting, and refusing it outright is awkward. Three cups is polite; shaking the cup means you are finished. The practice is UNESCO-listed.

Dress

Emirati men wear the white kandura and the ghutra headcloth; women the black abaya and shayla. These are markers of national identity rather than only of religion, which is why they are worn so consistently in a country where most residents wear whatever they like.

Falconry, camels and the sea

Falconry is a licensed, veterinary-supported pursuit with a hospital in Abu Dhabi devoted to it. Camel racing runs through the winter with robot jockeys controlled from cars driving alongside the track. Pearl diving is gone but the dhow yards at Ajman still build wooden boats.

Built culture, bought and made

The Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in 2017 under a thirty-year agreement with France, and the Guggenheim and Zayed National Museum are following on Saadiyat. Sharjah, meanwhile, has built the region’s most serious art biennial and a set of museums on its own terms.

The food of everyone else

Emirati cooking — machboos, harees, luqaimat — is served in a small number of restaurants and at home. What fills the streets is Keralan, Pakistani, Filipino, Iranian, Lebanese and Egyptian, and it is one of the best things about the country.

Arabic is the official language, and the local dialect is Gulf Arabic. In practice English is the working language of the country — in shops, hotels, taxis, hospitals and most workplaces — and a visitor can spend a fortnight here without needing a word of anything else.

Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Tagalog, Bengali and Farsi are all widely spoken, reflecting where the population comes from. Signage is bilingual Arabic and English throughout.

A few Arabic words are genuinely appreciated rather than merely tolerated: as-salamu alaykum as a greeting, shukran for thank you, min fadlak for please, yalla for let’s go, and inshallah, which is used constantly and means anything from certainly to almost certainly not.