divorced from the identity of Egyptian people and their local and national culture. Linguistic regionalists, mainly Arab and non-Arab writers, are calling for the consolidation of spoken varieties at the expense of the standard variety (Abuhamida 1988:42). According to Abuhamida (1988), this call for linguistic regionalism coincides with political regionalism. Lastly, proponents of a modern cultural and linguistic landscape in Egypt advocate increasing use of English in many social domains in order to connect to the international community. Their argument is that English has always been present in the postcolonial period. Schaub (2000) states that after a return to Arabic and Egyptian nationalism during the Nasser period in the 1950s and 1960s, the situation again changed towards favoring English after the 1973 October War against Israel (228). He also explains that during the Sadat years (1970-81), Egyptian university students turned increasingly towards the United States. From 1974 on, the U.S. Agency for Internal Development has offered assistance to Egypt in the training of public school teachers in English language instruction (228). English in Egypt is strategically used by the government and the media to achieve economic progress and to strengthen political and economic ties with the West. In sum, the interference of modern Western thought in colonial and postcolonial Egypt acts as a powerful organizing force for present-day language ideologies: the devaluation of the local dialects as a result of both pan-Arab nationalism and religious conservatism; an elevation of CA to a carrier of tradition and religious morals; the authority of MSA as a contemporary standard variety able to reflect scientific and economic progress; and the use of English as Colorado Research in Linguistics, Volume 22 (2010)4symbolic capital linking Egypt to the prosperity of the West. Proponents of each position use essentialized cultural differences between the East and the West as their logic and strategy to construct social action, morality, nationalism, and the right interpretation of language. In this highly contested, politicized language conflict over the best language variety, it is relevant to ask which linguistic features are seized on, and through what semiotic processes they are interpreted as representing the collectivity (Woolard 1998:18). These topics are explored in section two, which uses linguistic and sociolinguistic research to provide a description of CA, MSA, and Egyptian Arabic (EA) in the Arabic diglossia in Egypt and to show how language ideologies are linked to the linguistic structures of these language varieties. Section three demonstrates how language ideologies are ranked, play a structuring role in every-day interaction, and shape a variety of communicative strategies. Speakers use the shared historical, cultural, and linguistic background associated with varieties as an interactional resource in discourse. This dialectic aspect of ideology shows that simply using language in particular ways is not what forms social groups, identities, or relations...; rather, ideological interpretations of such uses of language always mediate these effects (Woolard 1998:18). In such interactional uses speakers take advantage of the social, moral, and political attributes of each variety, which leaves a picture of dynamic reinterpretation of language use in Egypt. The effects of these communicative strategies range