(1.79 million). Population pyramid data Education and employment The United Arab Emirates government have always focused on increasing the quality of education, allowing female access to higher education and value their achievements. Currently, there are more women in higher education than men, with total graduates of 58 percent. However, the unemployment rate for women is about more than five times higher than men. The program that is the most popular is business with the highest number of graduates, and the second popular program is humanities and social science. The UAE relies on migrant workers, and they make up a majority of the population and will continue to increase and will be about 88.2 percent of the population in 2030. Vital statistics UN prospects Source: United National World Population Prospects Births and deaths Life expectancy Source: UN World Population Prospects Ethnicity of UAE immigrants The UAE National Bureau of Statistics does not publish demographic data in relation to any nationality. The figures listed in the table below are estimates provided by each country's embassy. Source: United Arab Emirates Population Statistics *The figures for the countries cannot be directly sourced to embassy statements. Ethnic groups Emirati nationals 11.6% Other Arab and Iranian nationalities ≈18% South Asian nationalities 59% Other expatriate nationalities (includes Westerners, East Asians and Africans) ≈12% Languages Although Arabic is the official language, the most used language is English. English is also the main medium of instruction at all levels of schooling. Emirati people speak Gulf Arabic. The Achomi language (Persian dialect) is also spoken by a 303,000 people in the UAE. Other languages spoken in the UAE, due to immigration, include other Arabic dialects (such as Levantine Arabic), Malayalam (1,060,000 speakers in the UAE), Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, Persian, Cebuano, Pashto (144,000 speakers in the UAE), Kannada, Bengali (337,000 speakers in the UAE), Punjabi (201,000 speakers in the UAE), Odia, Telugu, Baluchi and Southern Baluchi (379,000 speakers in the UAE), Sinhala (121,000 speakers in the UAE), Russian, Somali, Tagalog (303,000 speakers in the UAE), Nepali, Mandarin, Tamil (455,000 speakers in the UAE), Spanish, Italian and Greek. In 2019, Abu Dhabi included Hindi as third official court language. Currently, the UAE government provides lectures and tests to obtain a driving license in Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil and Bengali, besides Arabic and English. Practiced religions Religions are represented in the UAE as follows: Islam (official) 76% Christian 9% Other 15% (primarily Hindu