The modern history of the Arab nation is characterized by the role of media and journalism in a) shaping how people feel about where they belong and who they are, particularly after World War I, b) the shaping of a standard Arabic common to all Arabic speakers, and facilitated by the spread of the media and the increased access to education. Three strands of modern identity which are linked to the place of the Arabic language and what mode of Arabic (dialect or standard), are identified: an Islamic vision of a state, an Arab-nationalist, and a local nationalist. Each of these ideas is still negotiating its space in society. Lastly, much research on the modern identity of the Arab world does not seem to pay enough attention to the role of language. This paper is a preliminary exploration of ideas of citizenship and the place of the Arabic language in it, in Egypt. It is based on ethnographic work conducted in Alexandria in May 2013, formal and informal interviews with journalists, students at the University of Alexandria, and the writing of two of Egypt’s most acclaimed authors. In interviewing the director of the journalism department at the library of Alexandria who is also an editor of a local newspaper, I ask the following questions: can we discuss an Arab identity common to all citizens of Arab states (from an Egyptian point of view)? If so, what does it revolve around? Where is the place of Arabic versus English in this identity? Where is the standard ‘fusḥa’ versus the Egyptian dialects ‘‘aamiyyah’ also in the construction of this identity? This interview is compared to the positions of two prominent Egyptian novelists, columnists and public figures: ‘alaa Al-Aswany and Yosef Zaidan. I chose these columnists in order to provide a perspective of ‘shapers’ of ‘public language standards’. Conclusions about Egyptian nationalism and the place of Arabic will be drawn, hopefully with some insights into some of the dynamics behind the Post-Arab Spring events in Egypt. The paper finds that in contrast to Western discourses of ‘ethnic hybridity’, the participants in this research were engaged in discourses of conflicting primordial identities, similarly, to discourses much earlier in the twentieth century in Egypt and the Arab World.