Coptic () is a dormant Afroasiatic language. It is a group of closely related Egyptian dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Egyptian language, and historically spoken by the Egyptians, starting from the third century AD in Roman Egypt. Coptic was supplanted by Arabic as the primary spoken language of Egypt following the Arab conquest of Egypt and was slowly replaced over the centuries.

Coptic has no modern-day native speakers, and no fluent speakers apart from a number of priests although it remains in daily use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and of the Coptic Catholic Church. It is written with the Coptic alphabet, a modified uncial form of the Greek alphabet with seven additional letters borrowed from the Demotic Egyptian script.

The major Coptic dialects are Sahidic, Bohairic, Akhmimic, Fayyumic, Lycopolitan (Asyutic), and Oxyrhynchite. Sahidic Coptic was spoken between the cities of Asyut and Oxyrhynchus and flourished as a literary language across Egypt in the period AD. The Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi library are primarily written in the Sahidic dialect. However, some texts also contain elements of the Subakhmimic (Lycopolitan) dialect, which was also used in Upper Egypt. Bohairic, the dialect of Lower Egypt, gained prominence in the 9th century and is the dialect used by the Coptic Church liturgically.

Name In Coptic the language is called () "Egyptian" or () "the Egyptian language". Coptic also possessed the term () "Egyptian", derived from Greek (). This was borrowed into Arabic as (), and from there into the languages of Europe, giving rise to words like French , whence the English Copt.

Geographic distribution Coptic is spoken liturgically in the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic Church (along with Modern Standard Arabic). The language is spoken only in Egypt and historically has had little influence outside of the territory, except for monasteries located in Nubia (which straddles modern Egypt and Sudan). Coptic's most noticeable linguistic influence has been on the various dialects of Egyptian Arabic, which is characterised by a Coptic substratum in lexical, morphological, syntactical, and phonological features.

History

The Egyptian language may have the longest documented history of any language, from Old Egyptian, which appeared just before 3200 BC, to its final phases as Coptic in the Middle Ages. Coptic belongs to the Later Egyptian phase, which started to be written in the New Kingdom of Egypt. Later Egyptian represented colloquial speech of the later periods. It had analytic features like definite and indefinite articles and periphrastic verb conjugation. Coptic, therefore, is a reference to both the most recent stage of Egyptian after Demotic and the new writing system that was adapted from the Greek alphabet.

Pre-Islamic period

The earliest attempts to write the Egyptian language using the Greek alphabet are Greek transcriptions of Egyptian proper names, most of which date to the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Scholars frequently refer to this phase as Pre-Coptic. However, it is clear that by the Late Period, Demotic scribes regularly employed a more phonetic orthography, a testament to the increasing cultural contact between Egyptians and Greeks even before Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt.

Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt and the subsequent Greek administration of the Ptolemaic Kingdom led to widespread hellenization and Greek-Coptic bilingualism, especially in Lower Egypt, particularly the Nile Delta. This led to the entrance of many Greek loanwords into Coptic, particularly in words relating to technical, legal, commercial, and technological topics.

Efforts to write Coptic in the Greek alphabet probably began in the 1st century BC. The earliest text known is from the 1st century AD. This first phase of written Coptic is called Old Coptic and lasts into the 4th or 5th century. The earliest stage of experimentation with the Egyptian language in the Greek alphabet is often called Pre-Old Coptic or Graeco-Egyptian. Other authors distinguish between early and late Old Coptic.

Old Coptic consists of pagan writings of a magical or divinatory nature. These texts lack the consistent script style and borrowed Greek vocabulary of later Coptic literature, which is entirely Christian or para-Christian (i.e., Gnostic and Manichaean). Some use exclusively Greek letters, with none of the borrowed Demotic Egyptian script of standard Coptic, while others use more Demotic letters than became standard. The production of pagan magical texts written in Egyptian in Greek letters continued into the period of Coptic literature proper.

One traditional theory links the origin of literary Coptic to the Gnostic community in Alexandria. No surviving Coptic manuscript, however, can be linked to Alexandria. Another links it to Christian monasteries and the need to translate Greek teaching into the vernacular. The high proportion of borrowed Greek vocabulary in early Coptic texts, however, makes their practical utility as translations questionable. More recently, it has been suggested that the revival of Egyptian as a literary language (in the form of Coptic) was part of an "effort to revive a national Egyptian culture." Paola Buzi refers to it as an "identity operation", an assertion of distinctness. Conversely, since the rise of the Coptic writing system paralleled the rise of Christianity, it may have been stimulated by the desire to distance itself from the pagan associations of traditional Egyptian writing.

Literary Coptic first appears in the 3rd century. The earliest literary texts are translations of Greek texts, either Christian or Gnostic. The five literary texts dated to the 3rd century are all biblical, either marginal annotations to Greek bibles or bilingual Greek–Coptic biblical texts. There is a single documentary text, a private letter on an ostracon, dated to this century.

Islamic period

The Arab conquest of Egypt brought the spread of Islam in the seventh century. At the turn of the eighth century, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, the Umayyad caliph, decreed that Arabic replace Koine Greek as the sole administrative language. Literary Coptic gradually declined, and within a few hundred years, Egyptian bishop Severus ibn al-Muqaffa found it necessary to write his History of the Patriarchs in Arabic. However, ecclesiastically the language retained an important position, and many hagiographic texts were also composed during this period. Until the 10th century, Coptic remained the spoken language of the native population outside the capital.

The Coptic language massively declined under the hands of al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, the Fatimid caliph, as part of his campaigns of religious persecution. Emile Maher Ishaq, a noted Coptologist, writes in the Coptic Encyclopedia that al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah issued strict orders completely prohibiting the use of Coptic anywhere, whether in schools, public streets, and even within family homes. Those who did not comply were liable to have their tongues removed. Oral traditions of the Coptic Church tell of removed tongues left on the street or in a public square to intimidate and warn against speaking Coptic.

As a literary language, Arabic began to slowly replace Coptic among native Egyptians in the 10th century and likely became the most used literary language between the 11th or 12th centuries; with the last known literary work written in Coptic dating to the late 14th century.

As a primary spoken language, Coptic was the majority language in Egypt until sometime between the 10th and 12th centuries, and then survived as a minority primary language until at least the 17th century. The language may have survived in isolated pockets in Upper Egypt as late as the 19th century.James Edward Quibell, "When did Coptic become extinct?" in Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, 39 (1901), p. 87. In the village of Zainiya (pi-Solsel) north of Luxor, passive speakers over 50 years old were recorded as late as the 1930s, and traces of traditional vernacular Coptic were reported to exist in other places such as Abydos and Dendera.Werner Vycichl, Pi-Solsel, ein Dorf mit koptischer Überlieferung in: Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Abteilung Kairo, (MDAIK) vol. 6, 1936, pp. 169–175 (in German).

From the medieval period, there are two known examples of tarsh-printed Coptic. The fragmentary amulet A.Ch. 12.145 of Austrian National Library, and the more intact University of Utah, Or. P.1563r containing a frame of Coptic text around an Arabic main text.

Modern revitalisation attempts

In the early 20th century, some Copts tried to revive the Coptic language, but they were unsuccessful.

In the second half of the 20th century, Pope Cyril VI of Alexandria started a national Church-sponsored movement to revive Coptic. Several works of grammar were published, including a more comprehensive dictionary than had been formerly available. The scholarly findings of the field of Egyptology and the inauguration of the Institute of Coptic Studies further contributed to the renaissance. Efforts at language revitalisation continue to be undertaken, and have attracted the interest of Copts and linguists in and outside of Egypt.

Dialects

There is little written evidence of dialectal differences in the pre-Coptic phases of the Egyptian language due to the centralised nature of the political and cultural institutions of ancient Egyptian society. However, literary Old and Middle (Classical) Egyptian represent the spoken dialect of Lower Egypt around the city of Memphis, the capital of Egypt in the Old Kingdom. Later Egyptian is more representative of the dialects spoken in Upper Egypt, especially around the area of Thebes as it became the cultural and religious center of the New Kingdom.

Coptic more obviously displays a number of regional dialects that were in use from the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in northern Egypt, south into Nubia, and in the western oases. However, while many of these dialects reflect actual regional linguistic (namely phonological and some lexical) variation, they mostly reflect localized orthographic traditions with very little grammatical differences.

Lower Egyptian dialects Bohairic

The Bohairic (also known as Memphitic) dialect originated in the western Nile Delta. The earliest Bohairic manuscripts date to the 4th century, but most texts come from the 9th century and later; this may be due to poor preservation conditions for texts in the humid regions of northern Egypt. It shows several conservative features in lexicon and phonology not found in other dialects. Bohairic is the dialect used as the liturgical language of the modern Coptic Orthodox Church, replacing Sahidic some time in the eleventh century. In contemporary liturgical use, there are two traditions of pronunciation, arising from successive reforms in the 19th and 20th centuries (see Coptic pronunciation reform). Modern revitalisation efforts are based on this dialect.

Bashmuric (also known as Mansurian, Dialect G, and Bashmurian) was a sub-dialect of Bohairic most likely spoken in Eastern Delta. Its main characteristic is using solely Greek letters to represent Coptic phonemes.

Upper Egyptian dialects Sahidic