“There is a feeling that Arabic is fast becoming a second language in the Gulf, as people need to use English as a common language with the huge number of expatriate workers who make up most of the private sector, and as the wealthy and educated youth increasingly speak to each other in English,” she added.

The tendency of educated Arab youth to switch back and forth from Arabic to English — or Inglizi in Arabic— is popularly known as Arabizi. That is also the name of a blog devoted to the use of Arabic run by Fatma Said, a researcher in applied linguistics at Birkbeck, University of London.

“The problem is the whole education system in the Gulf countries,” Ms. Said said. “I’ve heard plenty of young Arab children who speak English with a Thai or a Philippine accent” picked up from domestic help.

“If the parents are wealthy enough to send their children to private schools everything is taught in English,” she continued. “In state schools in the Gulf the medium of instruction is Arabic, but the teaching is often not very good. And Gulf Arabic is very different from Modern Standard Arabic. So how do they expect students to learn?”

Patricia Ryan , who has taught English in the Gulf for 40 years and currently teaches at Zayed University in Dubai, said requiring students to learn English was a mistake. “Latin was the language of the powerful Roman Empire, and where is it now?” she said. She added that promoting Arabic in schools, particularly in universities, would help preserve written Arabic. It could also lead to more original research in Arabic, the same way that research is produced in native languages in Germany, Russia and China as a complement to research in English, she said.

But she warned that the benefits would take time. “We can’t just jump from teaching math in English to teaching it in Arabic,” she said. “School is hard enough without burdening the students with these language shuffles.”