Arabic: This Sounds Mighty Strange

This article from a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates seems awfully strange, for it says that their students are not fluent in Arabic. How could students whose native tongue is Arabic not be fluent in it? What they mean is that they aren’t fluent in the formal language, while it is assumed that they are fluent in the local dialect. However, the two are more distant from each other than casual English used in conversation and the more formal English used in newspapers. (For an analogy, imagine if Shakespearean English were used in our newspapers.) From what I’ve gathered, college students in Arabic-speaking countries have to take formal Arabic all four years they are in college, if they want to master it. Ugh. I’m glad that isn’t true for English!

Anyway, the instruction in their colleges and universities is often in English, but then their graduates join businesses where they are expected to translate documents from Arabic into English and vice versa, and they can’t do it.