According to Ethnologue there are no native speakers of Modern Standard Arabic, but a total of 273,989,700 second language speakers in the world. They add that: "In most Arab countries only the well-educated have adequate proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic."Arabic, Standard, 24th Edition, Ethnologue In Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, French is the language of higher education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM),Remplacer le français par l’anglais à l’université ? Polémique linguistique en Algérie, Madjid Zerrouky, Le Monde, 30 July 2019 while in the Gulf region it's English.
