Posting and commenting on online social networks has become recently a part of the daily communication in Egypt especially since the revolution of the 25th January 2011 in which networks such as Facebook and Twitter played an essential role. Using the rich data of online social networks, this paper focuses on contemporary Arabic with its linguistic aspects of multi-diglossia in Egypt. In Mustawayāt al-ʻArabīyah al-muʻāsịrah fī Misṛ (contemporary Arabic levels in Egypt) (1973), Badawi presented his model consisting of five levels which are Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Colloquial Arabic of the educated, Colloquial Arabic of the enlightened, and Colloquial Arabic of the illiterates. Relying on this model, this study classifies Facebook posts into contemporary Arabic levels in Egypt and investigates if there is code switching among these levels in the written communicative discourse on Facebook as an example of online social networks. Moreover, instances of code switching are categorized into types. From different 60 Facebook public pages related to public figures under the Facebook category politician which got minimum 20,000 'likes' as an indicator for the popularity of the page, 100 written posts in Arabic with their comments appeared all over February 2014 were collected 30 days later to have enough time to be commented on, after their being posted, for example, on the first March, the data of the first February were collected. Every day for 30 days, two new different pages were searched for data that are defined to which level according to Badawi's model they belong. Using corpus tools, evidence of code switching among Arabic levels has been detected on a scale of four switching levels: a whole post or comment, a sentence, a phrase, and a word level. The findings of this research guide teachers of Arabic as a foreign language while preparing their lessons to select proper texts from online social networks for both Modern Standard Arabic and Colloquial Egyptian Arabic classes and help them teach their students to understand and to use switching among Arabic levels as the natives do. Such authentic written communicative language can enrich foreigner students further not only while listening and speaking in skills or media classes but while communicating outside classes as well.

This study investigates the use of the Arabic and Latin scripts in Morocco in daily communication, including digital or online interaction, and advertising. Many people in Morocco use the French-based Latin characters to write their local varieties such as Moroccan Arabic and Amazigh/Berber. Heated debates took place recently in Morocco surrounding the official adoption of the Tifinagh script to codify Berber; however less focus has been placed on the unofficial selection of Latin script to write Arabic and Berber varieties. This study investigates the linguistic and social factors involved in such selection, and argues that the use of Latin script is ideologically connected to the status of French in the country as a language that indexes power, modernity and social prestige. This research builds on work that sees writing systems as a social field and a site for investigating language ideologies and issues of identity. Different criteria affect the use of a particular script, and these include usefulness and practicality, often defined in terms of accessibility to the population and the spread of literacy. These criteria, however, become secondary when compared to social and ideological considerations. In order to investigate the factors for using the Latin script in Morocco, the current study employs a research approach that incorporates observation, questionnaire surveys, and recorded interviews. The results of this study are significant for interpreting the practicalities and ideologies behind the utilization of the Latin script in Morocco. The results also help us understand the language and script hierarchies in countries beyond Morocco in which multiple writing systems interact and compete.

It is believed that the language of the newspapers plays a major role in developing and reflecting the reality of the contemporary language in Egypt, where Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) have become much closer and the gap between them has shrunk (Badawi, 2012). The linguistic reality described in Badawi’s model (1973) mirrors the linguistic structure of the contemporary Egyptian community. This structure, from a horizontal point of view, shows that the contemporary Arabic in Egypt can be classified into five levels that are adjacent, namely classical Arabic, modern standard Arabic, colloquial of the cultured, colloquial of the lightened and colloquial of the illiterate. Since Badawi established his model, little research had been done on the language of newspapers in light of his model. Moreover, until recently when defining None-Modern standard Arabic (NMSA), it is introduced as “the spoken variation used by Egyptian people in daily conversations…, and it is used in a very limited way in written texts as in reporting dialogues (Warschauer, El Said, & Zohry, 2006). This descriptive study aims at providing answers to the following research questions: 1- where does the Language of Contemporary Egyptian Newspapers (LCEN) used in opinion articles (headline vs. body of the article) lie according to Badawi’s model? 2- What types of NMSA are used in these opinion articles? A sample data of opinion articles in three widely read Egyptian newspapers was collected over a period of two months; from 1st of November till the 19th of December 2011. The study analyzes the data primarily on MSA or NMSA basis using the criteria Badawi used in his model. The NMSA has been classified under six categories to differentiate the types of NMSA incidents. The findings of this study show that NMSA is incorporated in opinion articles of the three newspapers under investigation at different degrees in both body of articles and headlines. Finally, it can be said that according to Badawi’s model, LCEN cannot be anymore classified exclusively under level two, known as MSA, and it has moved downward somewhere on his measuring stick of levels of contemporary Arabic Language in Egypt. This study depicts a more accurate and in-depth descriptive picture of the language used in opinion articles in some of the current Egyptian newspapers. It also helps teachers of Arabic as a foreign language when teaching Arabic in general and media classes in particular.

The presence of Arabic as a minority language in the US has been challenged due to the recent political climate, which has created a considerable challenge to the maintenance of Arabic and has contributed to its rapid attrition among Arab American youth. Therefore, a critical need arises to analyze the use of Arabic among heritage speakers in the US. Foundational work on narratives (Wolfson 1978, Labov and Waletzky 1997 [1967]) has examined the construction of narratives among monolingual speakers. However, recent work on narratives of personal experience has shifted the attention to bilingual experience in the construction of lived experiences (Hill 1995, Koven 2007). This paper analyzes Arabic heritage speakers’ performance of narratives of life events in Arabic and English to analyze the ways in which participants manipulate their knowledge of Arabic registers to narrate, perform, and comment upon different socially-situated personae. This study examines how participants entextualize (Bucholtz 2009) the different enregistered voices in the narrative (Bakhtin 1981) to perform lived experiences. The data in the study draws from a larger corpus of narratives of personal experiences, narrated by Arabic heritage speakers in the US. This study analyzes data from Arab-American participants, of Egyptian or Palestinian backgrounds, between the ages of 18 and 25, during 2013 and 2014. Following Koven (2001), interviews were conducted to elicit narrative stories first in Arabic, followed by a retelling of the same story in English. I argue that the limited exposure of Arabic heritage speakers to the range of registers in the Arabic language limits their performance of narratives outside their lived experiences in English. Thus, heritage speakers’ narratives in Arabic are constrained by fossilized linguistic forms that inhibit their ability to perform narratives of original speech events. In light of this, I will discuss the implications of heritage speakers’ limited exposure to varied Arabic registers and the future prospects for Arabic as a minority language in the US.