The question of identity in relation to language has hardly been dealt with in the Middle East and North Africa, in spite of the centrality of these issues to a variety of scholarly debates concerning this strategically important part of the world. The book seeks to cover a variety of themes in this area.

Introduction, Yasir Suleiman; Chapter 1 Divided Loyalties: Language and Ethnic Identity in the Arab World, Mike Holt; Chapter 2 Language and Identity in Egyptian Nationalism, Yasir Suleiman; Chapter 3 Language, Ethnicity and National Identity in the Tunisian Ethnic Joke, Ibrahim Muhawi; Chapter 4 Ethnolinguistic Communication in Tunisian Streets: Convergence and Divergence, Itesh Sachdev, Sarah Lawson-Sako; Chapter 5 The Construction of Identity in a Divided Palestinian Village: Sociolinguistic Evidence, Muhammad Amara, Bernard Spolsky; Chapter 6 Turkish as a Symbol of Survival and Identity in Bulgaria and Turkey, Çi?dem Balim; Chapter 7 Turkish as a Marker of Ethnic Identity and Religious Affiliation, Farida Abu-Haidar; Chapter 8 Language and Ethnopolitics in the Ex-Soviet Muslim Republics, Jacob M. Landau; Chapter 9 Language and Ethnic Identity in Kurdistan: An Historical Overview, Joyce Blau, Yasir Suleiman; Chapter 10 Language and Identity: The Case of the Berbers, Mohamed Tilmatine, Yasir Suleiman; Chapter 11 Hebrew and Israeli Identity, Bernard Spolsky;