This paper uses qualitative and quantitative methods to compare the intonation of formal and colloquial varieties of Egyptian Arabic in a corpus of elicited read speech, to explore the widely held assumption that spoken formal Arabic will have the intonational characteristics of the speakers's colloquial variety. Speakers are found to use broadly parallel phonological systems in each register, reflected in parallel distribution and type of pitch accents. A quantitative analysis of the pitch target alignment to the segmental string reveals only minor differences in the phonetic realisations of pitch accents across registers.