How Emirati youth redefine language

CODE-SWITCHING SHAPES DAILY CONVERSATIONS, BALANCING HERITAGE WITH GLOBAL IDENTITY

- BY AALIYA ALZAROONI Reporter

Walk into a cafe in the UAE and eavesdrop for a moment. You'll hear it: Conversations that start in Arabic, slip into English halfway through, and sprinkle in a few slang words or 'LOLs' before circling back to 'yalla, let's go'.

For young Emiratis, this is a rhythm. A new kind of bilingual (and sometimes trilingual) dance that reflects both the pull of globalisation and the push of tradition. “I usually speak a mixture of Arabic and English in conversations,” says Sama Alzarooni, 19, from Sharjah. “Some ideas are easier to express in English, others in Arabic, so switching feels automatic. It’s our normal.”

For Omar Almur, 22, from Dubai, the pattern is similar, even if the emphasis leans more toward English: “I switch between Arabic and English more often than I'd like to admit. Some words just come faster in Arabic, like La, Haih or Mashallah, they’re almost impossible to replace,” he says.

What is code-switching?

Linguists call this phenomenon code-switching. In the UAE, it has a twist: ‘Arabeezy’, where Arabic is typed using English letters and numbers online.