The accent in the copy

A great deal of the Arabic that goes out for UAE National Day is written in Cairo.

I know because I live here, and because much of the region's copy is produced in this city, by good writers, for a reader in Abu Dhabi they have never met. The grammar is correct. The proofreader signed it off. The client approved it in English.

Then it lands in front of an Emirati this week, and something happens that no proofreader can catch. The reader does not correct the grammar. They place the accent.

Every Arabic speaker does it within a line. A word choice, a construction, the way the greeting is built, and the reader knows where the writer grew up. Not roughly. Precisely. It is the same reflex that tells you, three words into a phone call, which side of the Red Sea the caller is from.

On most days it barely matters. A product description with a Cairo accent sells the product fine in Dubai. But National Day is not most days. It is the one day a brand is speaking as family, and on that day the accent is the whole message. The words say one of you. The construction says written somewhere else.

So the brand becomes a guest on the one day it was trying to be family. Politely received, correctly thanked, placed.

The fix is not better Arabic. The writer in Cairo is already good. The fix is a decision that has to be made before the first line exists: whose Arabic this is. If the answer is an Emirati reader, then the line is written by someone whose ear was tuned there, or it is not written in Arabic at all. An English greeting is honest about where it came from. A Cairo greeting under a UAE flag is pretending, and the reader can hear it.

Decide whose Arabic before deciding what it says.