Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia
The official language of Saudi Arabia is Arabic. The three main regional variants spoken by Saudis are Hejazi Arabic, Najdi Arabic, and Gulf Arabic. There are approximately 2 million Gulf Arabic speakers in Saudi Arabia, and the dialect is only spoken in the Eastern Province. The remaining Arabic speakers in the province speak one of the other two dialects, more commonly the Najdi dialect. Saudi Sign Language is the principal language of the deaf community. The large expatriate communities also speak their own languages, the most numerous of which are Indian languages, Filipino/Tagalog, Egyptian Arabic, Indonesian, Rohingya, and Urdu.Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil producing company of Saudi Arabia, is based in Dhahran, which is located in the Eastern Province, and most decisions on oil policy and production that affect the global economy are made there. The kingdom's main oil and gas fields are mostly located in the Eastern Province, onshore and offshore. Notable among these are the Ghawar Field and the largest crude increment in the world. Petroleum from the fields is shipped to dozens of countries from the oil port of Ras Tanura and is also used as feedstock in numerous industrial plants in Jubail.
Classical Arabic
In the late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal ‘poetic koiné’ distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd, probably in connection with the Lakhmid court of al-Ḥīra. During the first Islamic century the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke a form of Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. The standardization of Classical Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the "ʿarabiyya" "Arabic", Sībawayhi's "al"-"Kitāb", is based first of all upon a corpus of poetic texts, in addition to the Qurʾān and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the "ʿarabiyya". "Colloquial" Arabic refers to the many regional dialects derived from Arabic spoken daily across the region and learned as a first language, and as second language if people speak other languages native to their particular country. By the 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, as it was the lingua franca across the Middle East, North Africa, Horn of Africa during those times; the analogy is like most literate Romance speakers were also literate in Classical Latin. Various Arabic dialects freely borrowed words from Classical Arabic, this situation is similar to Romance languages, wherein scores of words were borrowed directly from Classical Latin. People speak Classical Arabic as a second language if they speak colloquial Arabic dialects as their first language, but as a third language if others speak other languages native to a country as their first language and colloquial Arabic dialects as their second language. But Classical Arabic was spoken with different pronunciations influenced by informal dialects. The differentiation of the pronunciation of informal dialects is the influence from native languages previously spoken and some presently spoken in the regions, such as Coptic in Egypt, Berber, Punic or Phoenician in North Africa, Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian and Old South Arabian in Yemen, and Aramaic in the Levant.