A lot of hand wringing goes on, in this part of the world, about the future of Arabic. The language.

The National often prints stories about how Emirati schoolkids are not quite fluent in Arabic. Neither written nor oral. An astonishing concept, really. (Imagine American schoolkids who can’t actually speak English.)

Which usually leads to calls for more attention paid to teaching and learning in Arabic, and an insistence on Arabic-fluent teachers in schools … which doesn’t tend to happen.

A case could be made that Arabic, at least in this part of the Gulf, may not be the most prominent language in the region — and in the not-too-distant future.

The threat comes from at least two directions, one human, one mechanical.

The first is the “hand that rocks the cradle” line of thinking.

The ideas behind that were outlined by a Zayed University student in a recent op-ed piece in The National.

The nub of it is this: Many (most?) Emiratis have a “domestic” in the house. Many have more. Some have nearly half a dozen, the author suggests. A maid or two, a cook, at least one nanny, a driver or two …

The more prominent the family, the more domestic help, the less likely it is that the kids of those prominent parents will be fluent in Arabic. But they will be quite capable of speaking English, the everyday language of the UAE.

Most of those inexpensive domestics considered necessary in Emirati household are not Arabic speakers. They probably come from Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines, and they interact with the family in the one language that everyone can understand, at least a little. English.

We know one Emirati, the mother of two sons, who does not speak Arabic to her own children. English only. She has decided English is the future. And probably simplifies interaction inside the household. Her practical approach to the topic may be in the minority, but it is interesting that it exists. At all.

The second factor in the regional Arabic crisis is more subtle, but was outlined at length in The National’s weekly op-ed section, “Review”.

In it, the author goes back to the explosion of internet access in the 1990s. He notes that the earliest days of what, back then, was often referred to as the worldwide web … was entirely done in the Roman alphabet, which left Arabic speakers forced to adapt to (and learn) the Roman alphabet and how to write in it — if they wanted to be part of this cyber revolution.

What they came up with was a sort of hybrid language, rendered on Roman characters, influenced by some quasi-Arabic flourishes.

Let’s go straight to the story.

“The preponderance of Arabish in the digital realm should come as no surprise. The language was born online during the 1990s, when operating systems, web browsers, personal computers, keyboards and keypads were unable to support Arabic.

“The only readily available option at the time was to use the Roman fonts and characters defined by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a character-encoding scheme based on the English language that defined the 128 characters – including the numerals 0-9 and the letters A-Z – that appear on printers, keyboards, computers and communication equipment. Originally developed for telegraphic communication, ASCII soon became the effective lingua franca of the internet, a huge benefit to languages written in Roman script, but a massive problem for the users of different alphabets.”

The result was that Arabic-language operating platforms were not really in this ultra-modern, progressive marketplace for at least a decade, and maybe more. Most of a generation grew up with no access to Arabic keyboards but, for the smartest of them, it didn’t really matter.

In the National piece, the author quotes someone who was at the forefront of “Arabish” usage — a sort of meld of English and Arabic, but displayed on Roman-alphabet keyboards. He is now in his 30s and decries the continued written usage of English by Arabs younger than he is. Because those younger people do, now, have access to Arabic-capable laptops, phones and other electronic devices that their older brothers, or parents, did not.

It has led to what some call a “moral crisis” among Arabic speakers in the UAE, and perhaps in other oil-rich nations nearby, particularly Qatar and perhaps Bahrain. The notion that on their watch, Arabic became only the second-most-important language to Arabs.

Several of the voices in the think piece suggest that Arabic will never be forgotten because it is the language of the Koran.

Those who know the history of Western Civilization are likely to make a quick association.

Latin was the common tongue from north Africa to England, from Spain to the Rhine River, but it morphed into new languages in the second half of the first millennium AD. Latin, per se, died out as a daily language.

Latin did, however, remain the language of the church for nearly 2,000 years. But now even the church has shifted to local languages.

That could be how this will go down in this part of Arabia, too. First the end of Arabic as the language of the streets … and, at a later date, the abandonment of the classic Arabic of the Koran, translated into whatever language has replaced it.

All of it thought provoking.

Language is an integral part of a culture, and feeling it shift into something new must be a disorienting and perhaps frightening concept.

But, sometimes, these seismic shifts take on a momentum of their own, and that momentum may, in some cases, have been given additional impetus by the presence of outsiders speaking the common language of the era.

In the UAE, Emiratis make up no more than 1 million people in a country that contains something like 8 million. Those other 7 million nearly all speak a form of English to each other, and the Emiratis find themselves carried along.

Those who prize Arabic as a living language have reason to be alarmed.