Listing rudimentary language proficiency in an application in that country despite English being working language Should a person list his/her (very basic) knowledge of a language spoken in a country he may be working in on an application for a position in that country, even if the language really isn't necessary for doing the job at all?


The actual work will be published in English
Everyone in the department/university/practically the country speaks English (cf. "Do PhD courses in engineering fields in European non-English speaking countries require knowledge of the native language?")
The resources which are partial to the work are all in English
It's a linguistic community small enough that knowing the language would probably raise more questions along the lines of: "How on Earth did you come to learn language?" than anything else
My actual abilities, since anything you list on CV is fair game during an interview:


My abilities in said language are not good enough to hold a conversation of any kind.
My actual proficiency isn't in that language but rather in a ridiculous mixture of a few closely-related languages plus a large amount of creative interpretive abilities ("ah, x from language_a sounds a bit like y from language_b!"). On the bright side, this means that my passive abilities are better than "rudimentary".



The only reason I can come up with for listing said language is that it could pique someone's interest (see question 4 above) and that it may indicate a small tendency to be able to thrive while living in the country (or rather, more accurately, the probability of the person floundering in the country may be slightly lower); So do these "soft" benefits outweigh the lack of hard ones?
I think yes, you should list it with caveats at the end of CV, using something like


  Languages:
  
  English (fluent), Arabic (basic passive)


and it the country in question is in Europe, just use the EU proficiency levels: for example,


  English (C2), Portugese (A1) 


Frankly, I don't think it would help. It can't hurt and it maybe gives you some points for being keen, but the time you waste thinking on this might be better spent studying something. Maybe even the language in question.