Book excerpt: First published in 1997. The field of Arabic sociolinguistics has made rapid strides since the appearance of the first correlation studies in the early 1980s. Up to that point, studies of non-standard Arabic had largely been confined to the field of dialectology, in which the researcher's frame erred on the historical or cultural. Dr. Haeri's work falls into the Labovian sociolinguistic paradigm, with the edition of the awareness of the local social backdrop in her linguistic investigations and how this needs to be integrated into any correlation work, and also being area of the general Arab sociolinguistic frame of reference of which the situation in Cairo forms a part.