Nearly everyone here speaks some English. From the Emiratis to the Indians and the Pakistanis and the Filipinos and the Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Nepalese, Bangladeshis …

The trick is … understanding what they say.

Every day we find ourselves mentally straining to understand what we are saying to each other. And I’m talking about inside the offices of The National here in Abu Dhabi.

Before coming to work here, I understood that England was a hothouse of regional accents, but I never grasped how many individuals converse in accents that are hard for a Yank to understand.

Like, nearly all of them.

In the U.S., you hear the basic “BBC English” in a movie or TV show … and it sounds a bit amusing, but we know what is being said.

Turns out, almost zero Brits actually speak BBC English.

It is a country with a bewildering welter of regional accents that have somehow persisted despite a century of the BBC’s (in theory) unifying efforts.

In our office, we have Midlanders and Mancunians, East Enders, Yorkies, Geordies … and some of those accents are tough even for other Englishmen to understand — and they share the same small island. Then factor in the other “Britons” — the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish … as well as Canadians (Yanks can understand all of them, thank goodness), and even a stray South African …

The result is we talk to each other all the time … but we often do not know what our co-worker just said. Which leads to an eight-hour-shift of, “Excuse me?” Which leads to the statement being repeated and me still not knowing what was being said … and then just guessing what it was about.

I mean, you can’t expect someone to keep repeating things.

I have particular trouble with the Scottish accents. They are hardest for me. More difficult than the Irish or Welsh or Cornish or Geordie accents.

Unfortunately (for purposes of quick communication), we have no fewer than three Scots working in sports, and I might be on the phone with one of them at any given moment, trying to decipher what they are saying and reacting to it … and often giving an answer to a question that wasn’t asked.

Conversation in the newsroom gets even more difficult when our subcontinenters are involved. Native speakers of languages from India, mostly, whose accents are quite strong. I have severe trouble understanding some of them.

Presumably, it works the other way, too — they cannot understand me. Although it is difficult for someone who speaks “general American English” to grasp that another English speaker might not understand me.

I have been told, however, that the “southern” English spoken by one of the Yanks in the department is easier to understand than I am. What a concept.

So, on any given day, we all have “brain strain” from trying to decipher what we’re saying to each other. In English.

More than once in a while, it seems as if it would all be easier if we wrote down what we wanted to say and just e-mailed it to the guy sitting 10 feet away.  We still use the same letters, if not always the same words.