From 'I' to 'We': Positioning Self in Political Slogans in the Kuwaiti Elections

Diaglossia is defined as the situation where two varieties of the same language coexist; one as a high variety (H), and one as a low variety (L) (Ferguson, 1959). Although many researches have looked at Arabic language... [ view full abstract ]

Diaglossia is defined as the situation where two varieties of the same language coexist; one as a high variety (H), and one as a low variety (L) (Ferguson, 1959). Although many researches have looked at Arabic language situation, to my knowledge, there is nary a research that investigates the political slogan in Kuwait. With the rise of the Arab Spring and protest movements that occurred in the end of 2011 (Salih, 2013) starting from Tunisia, the National Assembly in Kuwait has been struggling to fulfill its duties, which led for the need of a constitutional dissolution by the Amir in 2011. Voting is considered to be a high pressuring process by which the candidates have to convince their voters with different slogans and show the different stances. This research looks meticulously at the slogans used in the 2016 Kuwaiti National Assembly elections. The research investigates the varieties used in expressing these slogans and how these varieties are positioned according to the three levels of Bamberg's positioning theory (1997). The research includes a corpus of different slogans, and analyzes them into two main categories; slogans with (1) presentation of the individual identities (2) presentation of the collective identities.