‘The Constitution Says’: Towards a Semiotics of Legal Myth in Diglossic Orders

Abstract How does legal myth sustain its authority in diglossic societies, and what happens when dominant actors, subaltern groups, and institutional guardians compete to control the same mythological form simultaneously? These questions animate this article’s analysis of the popular Egyptian Arabic formula al-dustūr biyaqūl (the constitution says) as a site of mythological production in post-2011 Egypt. Morphologically marked as vernacular by the colloquial proclitic ba- imperfective marker, the formula marks the intersection of Standard Arabic and Colloquial Arabic. Drawing on Barthes’s semiotics of myth and a corpus spanning social media, journalism, and parliamentary discourse, the article argues that the formula has evolved into a metamyth, an authority machine whose ideological force resides in form rather than content. The article makes three theoretical contributions. First, it proposes register recognition as a missing analytical category in the semiotics of law, indispensable wherever legal mythological authority operates across a diglossic divide. Second, cross-contextual circulation is posited as distinct from repetition, as evidenced by the formula’s authority being universalized through its movement across heterogeneous social contexts. Third, the article positions myth as a battleground of power in which dominant actors deploy the formula to naturalize social hierarchies (Muslim majority over Christian minority, Al-Ahly over Zamalek, and men over women), subaltern groups appropriate it as a counter-weapon, and institutional actors attempt to police its reach. This triadic struggle is dialectical rather than merely oppositional, insofar as hegemonic deployment and subaltern appropriation feed each other, sustaining the metamyth and extending its reach beyond any single actor’s control.