This socio-linguistic study throws new light on variation and the defining of register in Arabic political discourse. The research is based on three dialects (Egyptian, Iraqi and Libyan) and on political speeches delivered by Gamal Abdunnasir, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Al Gadhdhafi.

1 The sociolinguistic framework 1.1 Introduction 1.1.1 Defining Language 1.1.2 The speech community and social factors 1.1.3 Functions of language 1.1.4 Code-switching and code-mixing 1.2 Arabic and the Fergusonian dichotomy 1.2.1 Blanc and interdialectal studies 1.2.2 The emergence of Educated Spoken Arabic as a concept 1.2.3 Badawi and new sociolinguistic approaches 1.4 Objectives of this book 2 Methodology 3 Form and Function in the Egyptian data 4 Form and Function in the Iraqi data 5 Form and Function in the Libyan data 6 Forms and functions: shared tendencies in the data 7 The political speech as a textual genre