Dialectal variation and identity in post-revolutionary Libyan media: The case of Dragunov (2014)

This paper is based on the Libyan TV show Dragunov (2014) and aims to answer the question of how language was used during and after the 17th February Revolution, focusing particularly on the way in which the Libyan media used dialectal variation to politically characterize characters. Libya offers a uniform dialectal landscape, which can be divided into three areas, Western, Transitional (or Central) and Eastern Libyan Arabic (Pereira 2008: 53). In the wake of the Revolution that overthrown the military regime in 2011, Dragunov offers a counter-discourse to the Bedouin rhetoric on which Ghaddafi built his legitimacy. This research partially fills the gap in the sociolinguistic studies concerning Libya, employing both qualitative and quantitative analysis tools to show that the Bedouin varieties of the transitional zone were consciously employed in Dragunov to characterize the ideology and political affiliation of the characters, independently of their geographic origin. The research is based on the analysis of the 15 episodes (594 minutes).