The dominance of English on the Internet in the medium's early years caused great consternation about a possible threat to local languages and cultures. Though the hegemony of English online has since weakened, there is still concern about how English and other languages interact online, but there has been almost no research on this issue. This paper combines linguistic analysis, a survey, and interviews to examine English and Arabic language use in online communications by a group of young professionals in Egypt. The study indicates that, among this group, English is used overwhelmingly in Web use and in formal e‐mail communication, but that a Romanized version of Egyptian Arabic is used extensively in informal e‐mail messages and online chats. This online use of English and Arabic is analyzed in relation to broader social trends of language, technology, globalization, and identity.

Historically, Egypt was a land of immigrants not emigrants (Sell, 1988). Egypt has been an area of international migration (migration from the eastern and the northeastern Mediterranean countries to Egypt). In the past, foreigners were coming to Egypt while Egyptians rarely migrated abroad till the mid 1950s. The ancestors of the Egyptian people include many races and ethnic groups, including Africans, Arabs, Berbers, Greeks, Persians, Romans, and Turks. This paper surveys Egyptian immigration with emphasis on emigration to complete the picture. The study is migrant-focused, though some elements of Egyptian government policy are also included. Sections on migration to Egypt focus mainly on refugees, using as examples the largest populations from Palestine, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, because they form the majority of new migrants to Egypt. These sections are primarily concerned with the policies of the Egyptian government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which decides refugee status in Egypt. To take a migrant-focused approach to immigrants-mainly refugees-who come from at least 30 different countries, would require political and economic analyses of their countries of origin, and this is beyond the scope of this study. 2 The dominant geographical feature of Egypt is the River Nile. The Nile represents the main source of water for agriculture, and consequently is a major determinant of the spatial distribution of population and economic life. Rapid population growth is one of the crucial problems that hinder development efforts in Egypt. While the doubling of Egypt's population between 1897 and 1947, from 9.7 million to 19 million, took fifty years, the next doubling took less than thirty years, from 1947 to 1976. Today, Egypt's population approaches 70 million. The annual population growth rate is around 2 %. About 95 % of the population is crowded onto around the 5 % of the total land area that is formed by the narrow ribbon of dense population and agriculture that follows the course of the Nile. The remaining 95 % of the land is desert. Although it can be seen as a kind of The Place of Egypt in the regional migration system as a receiving country Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol. 19-n°3 | 2003

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The gendered division of domestic labor has been widely studied over the last three decades. However, older adults' contribution to housework, especially in patriarchal communities in the Middle East, has been largely overlooked. This article examined the participation of older members of the household in domestic labor in three communities in the outskirts of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. Drawing on a sample of 2,797 households, the results revealed that three salient factors seemed to have the major impact on older adults' participation in domestic labor; these were the presence of adult women (18-59 years old) in the household, the marital status and age of older adults. Older men's participation in domestic labor was much lower than that of older women, suggesting that a gender divide exists among older adults in the patriarchal setting of the study. Housework remains feminized in the later stage of life.

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