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This paper examines the strategic use of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for identity construction and identity attribution in protest signs and government communiqués in post-revolutionary Egypt.
The data analyzed in this study consist of aproximately 400 protest signs as well as approximately 90 SCAF communiqués published exclusively on SCAF’s Facebook page. Following the success of the January 25th Egyptian revolution, protesters have periodically re-occupied public spaces—such as Cairo’s Tahrir Square—to make demands of the military ruling council (SCAF). In the summer of 2011, sit-ins in Cairo and Alexandria emerged as democratic public spaces, free for over a month from physical interference by the state, spaces in which citizen authors used the medium of protest signs to address each other, SCAF, and the nation. Signs are categorized according to medium (handmade or machine-printed), imagery, and the linguistic codes they employ (ECA, MSA, romanized Arabic and English). SCAF communiqués employ only high-register Modern Standard Arabic.
According to most scholarship on diglossia in the Arab world, colloquial Arabic is limited to spoken interactions in informal contexts, while MSA is the primary vehicle of written discourse. However, a significant percentage of analyzed protest signs employ ECA, either as the sole linguistic code or alongside other codes. This diversity contrasts starkly with the elevated register of the SCAF communiqués. This paper argues that sign authors and SCAF employ divergent tools in their competition for authority and authenticity, each seeking to undermine the other’s articulation of identity through choice of medium (SCAF’s use of Facebook, cognitively associated with the success of the revolution) and linguistic code (sign authors’ use of ECA in written political discourse).