Mixed Varieties in Political Language in Egypt: the Presidential Debate between ‘Amr Mūsa and ‘Abd al-Min‘im Abu l-Futūḥ

Abstract

In the diglossic language situation existing in Arabic speaking communities, speakers continuously adapt their language to the context by moving up and down the linguistic continuum between literary Arabic and the various dialects, thus creating mixed varieties of Arabic. This paper deals with the use of mixed language in an Egyptian political debate, broadcasted on national television, between two candidates for the presidential elections of June 2012. Focusing on the use of three morphosyntactic variables (relatives, demonstratives and negative markers) in the data, it was noted that these features have different degrees of ‘flexibility’: some are more likely to be used in a hybrid context than others. In order to offer an explanation for these differences in flexibility, grammatical and pragmatic methods are combined. A grammatical analysis of the three variables in the data shows that speakers tend to use the dialectal variants when the syntactic structures for the use of a feature are similar in literary and Cairene Arabic. However, this cannot explain interor intraspeaker differences that occur in the data. A pragmatic analysis – looking at the context of enunciation in which the utterances are produced – shows that there seems to be a link between inherent references to the act of enunciation on the one hand, and speakers’ preference for dialectal variants on the other.