Those people are either supercilious or sagacious. After 18 months here, I can still barely chat with someone. Thursday evening, for example, I went to dinner with about 30 people from church. The group was divided as follows:
15 - “Belad Issham” (Syria/Lebanon/Palestine)
10 - “Sa’ideen” (Egypt/Luxor/Aswan)
4  - Jordanian
1  - America
These participants organized themselves in a circle, installing the feckless American in the center. He functioned as a coffee table book: many spoke about him, but none ascertained his contents. His questions and timid contributions to the animated conversation were met with the obligatory wrinkled brows and head shaking that would discourage Napoleon. I used the word “trash” at one point.
“What?” my interlocutor said, head shaking.
“Trash” I repeated. More head shaking and brow wrinkling. I thus retrieved my notepad and pen and wrote “trash.”
“Trash,” my friend read, just as I had pronounced it.
“Yeah, trash. That’s what I said.”
“I know. You said that.”
Lord.

This confusion is caused largely by the various dialects present in the Arab world. One can scarecely select an accent in the UAE, though. I initially learned the Gulf vocabulary, but as my circle of friends expanded, I started to learn Egyptian, Lebanese, and Iraqi words. Great, I thought. Now I’ll sound more provincial.

One afternoon last year I was leaving the base. The guard stopped me and asked for a tissue. We chatted briefly in the Gulf dialect, and I asked if he would have leave soon. When he affirmed positively, I said “Nice”, as an Egyptian would.
“What are you, Egyptian or American? Don’t talk like that,” he said.
This was the first of many times that I learned not to mix dialects.

Arabs themselves complicate the learning process. In the Middle East, English proficiency indicates cultivation and status. On Wednesday evening I was speaking with the building watchman. He’s one of the only people who can tolerate my mangled speech. A sartorial Palestinian entered the building and issued several commands in English. Baffled, Ahmed said nothing (his English is limited to “yes” and “plumber”). I translated the requests for Ahmed, to which the Palestinian replied flippantly, “Uhh! I can speak Arabic.” He then continued for several moments in Arabic before striding towards his waiting Mercedes.

Later, an Egyptian stepped onto the elevator as I was retiring for the evening.

“You still studying Arabic?” he said in English.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said.
“Well, how’s it coming?” he asked eagerly.
“Super.”

Last evening I was out in Bani Yas, a small community 40km from Abu Dhabi. An Emirati family of Yemeni descent has taken me in, and I visit them on weekends. A debate erupted amongst several of the younger boys about how to lose weight (a pending wedding instigated the exchange). Why don’t you ask him, one said, flicking his eyes toward me. No way, the other said. He doesn’t understand anything. What’s worse: not understanding or understanding that you can’t understand?

As I have focused on Arabic for the last four months, I have noticed a simultaneous deterioration of my English. Perhaps I am most attentive to this change because of GMAT/GRE preparation this past summer. At that time, I was studying grammer, vocabulary, sentence structure. I corrected thousands of idiomatically incorrect sentences. I learned tenses and the appropriate use of them. As a result, ‘fluency’ became an operative term, not simply slang for ‘he can get his point across.’ But language is by nature a difficult thing, and without constant practice, comprehension of it deteriorates. Who but an engineer or mathematician can solve a simple integral after several years away from the subject? How much more difficult is the process of instantly selecting particular words from thousands of memorized options?

My English has also been impacted by the presence of parochial speakers here. English is used as a common language–like numbers–in the UAE, since over 80% of the country is expatriate. Almost everyone speaks English competently as a second language. Few, however, have resided in either Britain or America. Thus knowledge of idioms, of expressions and argot, is not ubiquitous; often I must pedantically rephrase sentences to be understood. Over time, I have thus unconsciously excised slang from my vocabulary. I noticed a difference while at home last month and so did others. One person who I had not seen for at least a year commented immediately on my accent: “Your speech is peculiar. Where did your accent go?” Well, I know where it went: it hid in the same shed that it fled to when I moved to Pennsylvania.