The subtlety of this humor emerges in the fact that this is an Egyptian peas- ant imitating the accent of the Sudanese. … As Jacob Landau and others note in their analyses of early Egyptian drama, the strangeness of an accent, in Arabic, delineated the degree of foreignness of the speaking character. Images of Turkish-speaking pashas were always good for a laugh,especially when they stumbled through the col- loquial Arabic of Egypt as they tried to issue orders to the subject class of the fallahïn. This situation represented an ironic view of the unsuitability of the pashas as rulers that resulted from their linguistic distance from Egyptian cul- ture. Accents provided a social map of all classes. The mistakes characters made, the vocabulary they used, all worked to distinguish them on a social, economic, national, ethnic, and racial scale.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 359