Where did he study? What is the official language of Jordan?

His schooling began at home. King Abdullah started his education at the Islamic Educational College in Amman. From there he moved abroad: he attended St. Edmund's School in Surrey, England, and completed high school at Deerfield Academy in the United States.

Military training, then university

He enrolled at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the United Kingdom in 1980, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1981, and afterward served as commander of a reconnaissance company in the 13th/18th Hussars, the British Royal Cavalry, in West Germany and England. After that military grounding came the academic chapters. In 1982 he joined Oxford University for a one-year program, completing a course of special studies in Middle Eastern affairs. Then, in 1987 he joined the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, as part of a mid-career leadership fellowship program, completing an advanced study program in international affairs within the framework of the Master in Foreign Service Affairs.

That combination, Sandhurst's discipline, Oxford's regional grounding, and Georgetown's international affairs rigor, maps directly onto the kind of leader he became: a head of state who speaks without an interpreter at the UN and understands both the military calculus and the diplomatic one.

The language of Jordan

Modern Standard Arabic is the official language of Jordan. That is Arabic in its formal, written form, the version used in government documents, courts, schools, and broadcast news across the Arab world. Day to day, daily conversation is conducted in local colloquial varieties, while Modern Standard Arabic is used in most written documents and the media. English is used widely in commerce and government as well, which partly explains why Abdullah addresses the UN in English without hesitation and why that detail carries such weight on the world stage.