Yes We Are: A Sociolinguistic Study of Egyptian Slang

Abstract

This article draws on a sociolinguistic study of slang as a marked speech style of Egyptian youth. This social group speaks a linguistic variety which is evaluated by other subgroups to be incomprehensive and inappropriate. This article presents examples from the Egyptian slang highlighting their semantic features (obscenities, address forms, addressee-oriented tags), their formation processes as well their social implications. The study sheds light on the degree of societal acceptance to the used slang, arguing that such linguistic deployment offers a variety of opportunities to a marginalized social group to express their novelty and uniqueness. The results extracted from the circulated survey uncover the features of such linguistic repertoire.