1 I. Introduction The politicizing of language that took place in Egypt before and after the January 25th revolution provides a rich environment for linguistic analysis on many levels. It is no exaggeration to say that discussion of language always feeds into politics through identity construction. As Paul Gee con- tends, language is in essence political: Politics is not just about contending political parties. At a much deeper level it is about how to distribute social goods in a society: who gets what in terms of money, status, power, and acceptance on a variety of different terms, all social goods. Since, when we use language, social goods and their distribution are always at stake, language is always “political” in a deep sense. 1 Note also that talk about language is in the weft and warp of social upheavals and political change. At times of political upheavals, language is of course always employed to leave the utmost effect possible on the masses. But codes are also drawn against each other, both carrying their own indexes; and at a time of conlict over political hegemony, there is a linguistic power struggle over who has access to the powerful code. Egypt, like all Arab countries, is a diglossic community, a community in which two language codes exist, each with a different function: Stan- dard Arabic (SA) and Egyptian colloquial Arabic (ECA). The irst is used 1. James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (Lon- don: Routledge, 2010), p. 7. Reem Bassiouney Language and Revolution in Egypt