On UN Arabic Language Day, let's make the effort to appreciate a centuries-old tradition

Native speakers and students alike can marvel at a language that has impacted everything from philosophy and poetry to science

A student practises her writing at an Arabic typography workshop in Dubai. Jaime Puebla / The National

Forty-six years ago, the United Nations included Arabic as its sixth official language. By 1973 the inclusion of Arabic was only natural, given the number of speakers worldwide. Today more than 422 million people around the world are fluent in Arabic. Whether or not they are native speakers, they celebrate its impact on literature, poetry, philosophy, religion, architecture, calligraphy and the transmission of scientific knowledge across fields. In my discipline – psychology – the centuries-old Arabic works of Ibn Sina, Ibn Imran and Ibn Al Haytham contain ideas that are still relevant to the field today.

Many English speakers who persevere with Arabic end up speaking a formal dialect that can sound antiquated. Occasionally, my outdated Arabic makes people giggle. It is like someone using Shakespearean English to ask for the time

The theme of this year's celebration is Arabic language and artificial intelligence. Organised as a collaboration between the United Nations and the Riyadh-based Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud Foundation, the celebrations in Paris on December 18 will feature events focusing on the role of AI in the preservation of Arabic in the digitised age.

Before coming to the UAE, I made an effort to study the language. I started by teaching myself and have been studying Arabic on and off for just over a decade, but I am still far from fluent. This says as much about my learning skills as it does about the richness, sophistication and complexity of Arabic. The language has 15 verb forms and uses the singular, plural and dual forms. It is also one of only a handful of the world's languages flexible enough to support two kinds of sentence structures: verb-subject-object as well as subject-verb-object, which is great for poetry.

In the US, the Foreign Service Institute uses a ranking system to show the approximate time needed for native English speakers to learn specific languages intensively. Arabic would take 88 weeks – about 18 months – as it is ranked as the most difficult language, along with Mandarin, Korean and Japanese.

Many English speakers who persevere with Arabic end up speaking a formal dialect that can sound antiquated. Occasionally, my outdated Arabic makes people giggle. It is like someone using Shakespearean English to ask for the time.

A student practices her writing at an Arabic typography workshop in Dubai. Jaime Puebla / The National

Minor anachronisms aside, whenever native Arabic speakers hear people making an effort to speak their language, their delight is genuine and overwhelming. This has always been my experience in the UAE. My spoken or written efforts are invariably met with encouragement.

By teaching Arab students who mostly speak English as a second language, my study of Arabic has made me far more empathetic, especially towards my students. It has also heightened my admiration for their sophisticated bilingualism. If Arabic is the most difficult language to learn for native English speakers, English is the equivalent for native Arabic speakers.

Occasionally I use a bit of Arabic in my classes, although I frequently make mistakes and am politely corrected by my students. The implicit message is loud and clear though: it is okay to mess up. It is through making mistakes that we learn. Of course, doing so sometimes leads to hilarious consequences.

For instance, the police once stopped a Canadian friend of my wife; the lady in question is married to an Emirati, wears a shehla and abaya and speaks a little Arabic. The police officer gestured for her to lower the car window. Then, in the concise style so characteristic of authority figures, he asked her: "Sura?"

To a slightly anxious person who has only a basic grasp of Arabic, "sura" can mean photo identification – but it also refers to a chapter from the Quran. You can imagine the police officer's bemusement when my wife's friend closed her eyes and began to recite Surat Al Fatiha, the opening verses from the Quran, in her best singsong Canadian accent.

Beyond the rich, amusing experiences I have had learning Arabic, it has also opened my mind and perhaps allowed me to glimpse other world views. For example, the word for camel (jamal) and beauty (jamaal) share the same linguistic root and I can now see how camels could be considered beautiful.

People come to the UAE to work and can end up staying for decades, raising families here. Unfortunately, very few make a consistent effort to learn the language. When it is time to leave, they might not even know how to say goodbye in Arabic. But it need not be that way.

Even if you don't learn to speak the language fluently, you can at least enrich yourself by learning one Arabic word a week. Studying the language of the UAE is a gift we can all give ourselves.

Justin Thomas is a psychology professor at Zayed University