ABSTRACT
This chapter critically engages with ways in which neoliberalism has become a driver of language policy in the UAE. It argues that it is in the context of the current neoliberal policy transformations that English has become the ‘must-own’ currency for consumers such as international students, UAE citizens and expatriate workers and their families in order to successfully compete in the UAE globalised education marketplace and to study, work and become entrepreneurial actors with enterprising virtues such as self-transformation, self-reliance, resilience, risk-taking and the like. It also contends that the current UAE policy direction of moving from an oil-based to a knowledge-based economy has created a series of complex paradoxes and contradictions that work against the interests of UAE policy convergence.
