ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on the subjects of diglossia, language attitudes, social identities, variation, and code switching and their individual and combined impact on the language behaviour of Arabic speakers. It examined their relationships to key aspects of the Arabic sociolinguistic situation, such as language prestige, language policies, language standardization, and so on. The book highlights the need to implement sociolinguistic criteria for defining the concept of mother tongue, which ought to be based on such issues as representation, identity, and localness. The application of sociolinguistic criteria presents Standard Arabic (SA) as a mother tongue for many Arabic speakers who see SA as a main marker of their Arab identities or explicitly claim SA as their mother tongue. The book reveals that the Egyptian college students have better skills in SA compared to Egyptian professors.
