Can Twitter - as a social media platform - be a revolutionary tool during the 2011 Egyptian uprising? Can it cause revolutions as stated by some Western reporters or does it take more to overthrow a strong regime? To answer this question, the study focuses on two approaches Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine a sample of tweets of the hashtag #Jan25. This study observes Twitter data from the micro-level to the macro-level, and looks at the relationship between these perspectives to language through Mood system, Person system, and Modal auxiliary system. The two approaches complement each other.They have contributed to a considerable understanding of Twitter discourse.

ABICHA Mohammed is an EFL teacher and a PhD candidate. He has been teaching for more than 25 years and he is still learning how to teach. He received his MA in 2012 in Meknes . He is currently a doctoral student at Ibn Tofail University, Kenitra. His main concerns are teaching/learning, critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics.