Coptic Language

Abstract

AbstractCoptic is the vernacular language of Late Antique Egypt, which shares historical and linguistic ties with the ancient Mediterranean world. The linguistic heritage from ancient Egyptian figures equally prominently. The Greco‐Egyptian hybridity of Coptic is the outcome of prolonged asymmetric bilingualism with the politically and culturally dominant language Greek. In replacing hieroglyphic writing and its cursive Hieratic and Demotic variants, the introduction of the Greco‐Coptic alphabet marks a turning point in Egypt's literary history. The Bible translations, which are datable to the late third and early fourth centuriesce, had a bearing on the proliferation of Coptic as a literary language, but the Manichean scholastic and literary traditions also played a role in the shaping of Coptic literature. Coptic emerged from late Roman Demotic in presumably less than three generations. The sudden appearance of a new Egyptian vernacular cannot directly be related to the vicissitudes of the Roman Egyptian religious marketplace and the advent of Christianity in Egypt. Out of the different Coptic dialects three gained supraregional importance: Sahidic, the dialect of Upper Egypt, Lycopolitan, the language of the Manichean literature, and Bohairic in the western Delta and Lower Egypt. In the Middle Ages, Coptic lost ground to Arabic in the course of a large‐scale language shift and was replaced by it in all public domains by the eleventh century. As part of its cultural legacy, the present‐day Coptic Orthodox Church retains a liturgy chanted in medieval Bohairic, while biblical lections are read in both Arabic and Coptic.