Arab Spring and When to Use Colloquial Arabic

Duncan Wane has a useful overview at Muftah called "The Many Arabics of Politics", a sort of compendium of how, during the Arab uprisings, the leaders' use of Arabic evolved with attempts to sound more informal as the crisis deepened. In our ongoing discussion of diglossia and classical vs. colloquial Arabic, we've touched on this before (such as when Ben Ali said he was going to speak in colloquial and then didn't). Wane's scorecard: Ben Ali and Mubarak stayed formal mostly to the end; Qadhafi more colloquial (but not his son Saif); Asad the most formal of all; Salih in Yemen and Bashir in Sudan more informal.