On November 25, the UAE government announced that its Federal National Council is drafting a law that would make Arabic “the language of instruction in state schools” as reported in the semi-official TheNational newspaper. Arabic has long been replaced by English as the language of instruction in most subjects in both the public and private school systems in the UAE, and the Arab Gulf region in general. But as the news item suggests, there is much angst among the local ruling elites about the status of Arabic and its future in their societies. The status of Arabic has been affected by great geopolitical changes in the Gulf region. Due to their massive energy resources, some of the Arabic-speaking countries in this region have undergone dramatic urban and demographic development over the past half century. Most of these countries now host sizable populations of speakers of languages other than Arabic, and in certain cases, like Qatar and the UAE, these form majorities in society. English naturally became the lingua franca of these diverse populations, and as cited by several UNDP reports, it has steadily pushed Arabic, the official language, out of both education and public life. The effects of using a non-native language as a medium of instruction on student cognitive development and scientific achievement have been investigated by some leading applied linguists over the last decades, including Cummins (1981) who identified two levels of language proficiency: the Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS), which covers the informal register of language needed for everyday life communication, and the Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), which covers more specialized language use such as in textbooks and formal debates. Cummins and other researchers like Krashen (1982) and Rosenthal (1996) generally agree that foreign language students may become quite proficient at the BICS level conversing fluently in the foreign language, yet lag behind their native-speaker peers at the CALP level which requires a more complex understanding of communication and text commonly found in academic subjects. This paper will explore the linguistic and extra-linguistic influences on language policy in the UAE. It will investigate the nexus between research on bilingual education, sociolinguistic factors, market economics effects, and political considerations in the shaping of the UAE’s language policy through a survey of the literature, analysis of data from the educational system, as well as interaction with key educators and policymakers in the country.