First published in 1987. This is monograph 7 in the Library of Arabic Linguistics. The author gives a prime exponent of the Labovian sociolinguistic approach in the Arabic field and this present study is the culmination of years of work on the dialects of Bahrain, following his four previous articles on the subject. He takes account of variability in the language of individual speakers both in the direction of the spoken dialects and in the direction of Classical Arabic and his approach takes into account factors of nationality, religious group affiliation, and occupational class in the selection of linguistic variables and is thereby squarely in the camp of the sociolinguists.