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.
Hejazi Arabic
A conservative phonological feature that Hejazi holds is the lack of palatalization for the letters , and , unlike in other peninsular dialects where they can be palatalized and merged with other phonemes in certain positions (to [t͡ʃ], [t͡s], [ʃ], or [s] in case of ك, [d͡ʒ] or [d͡z] in case of ق and in case of ج), it is also worth mentioning that this trait of non-palatalization is becoming common across Saudi Arabia especially in urban centers, another feature is that the ل is only velarized to /ɫ/ in the word الله /aɫːaːh/ 'god' (except when it follows an /i/: بسمِ الله or لله ) and words derived from it, unlike other peninsular dialects where it might be velarized allophonically, as in pronounced in Hejazi but in other peninsular Arabic dialects.