Scholarly and non-scholarly discourse on the UAE frequently highlights the absence of a pathway to official citizenship for most migrants, framing social in/exclusion along the citizen/noncitizen divide. This binary, however, falls short as a framework from which to study experiences of linguistic diversity on the ground, and in particular, to examine the relationship between language ideologies, policies, and everyday use. Although standard Arabic is the official language, the UAE’s demographic makeup combined with the exclusive nature of citizenship suppresses expectations of linguistic assimilation among its inhabitants. This lack of a dominant ideology of monolingualism leads, in some cases strategically and in others unintentionally, to the proliferation of ideologies of linguistic pragmatism and fluidity. This project explores language attitudes and accounts of everyday interactions in the UAE, with particular focus on ethnographic work with long-term, Arabic-speaking residents of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Ethnolinguistic interviews examine individual speakers' perceptions of the norms that guide their language use and the ways in which they draw on available linguistic resources to opt in or out of group membership at different times. I avoid bounded representations of specific national communities in favor of considering locally embedded ways of speaking that transcend national, ethnic, and linguistic divides. The research contributes to work on sociolinguistic diversity and its intersections with social organization (Arnaut et al 2015; Piller 2016; Rampton 2017), as well on noncitizen inclusion and belonging in the UAE.