Egyptian language

This article is about the languages spoken in ancient Egypt. For the language spoken in modern Egypt, see Egyptian Arabic. For the language that is the modern descendant of the Egyptian language, see Coptic language. For the book by Alan Gardiner, see Egyptian Grammar (book).
Egyptian
r
Z1		 nkmmt
O49
r n km.t[1][note 1]
Ebers Papyrus detailing treatment of asthma (written in hieratic)
RegionOriginally, throughout Ancient Egypt and parts of Nubia (especially during the times of the Nubian kingdoms)[2]
EthnicityAncient Egyptians
EraLate fourth millennium BC – 19th century AD[note 2] (with the extinction of Coptic); still used as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic Churches
Afro-Asiatic
  • Egyptian
Dialects
Hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs, Hieratic, Demotic and Coptic (later, occasionally, Arabic script in government translations and Latin script in scholars' transliterations and several hieroglyphic dictionaries[5])
Language codes
ISO 639-2egy (also cop for Coptic)
ISO 639-3egy (also cop for Coptic)
Glottologegyp1246
Linguasphere11-AAA-a
This article contains Coptic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Coptic letters.

The Egyptian language, or Ancient Egyptian (r n kmt;[1][note 3] "speech of Egypt") is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts, which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century.

Egyptian is one of the earliest known written languages, first recorded in the hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC. It is also the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 4,000 years.[6] Its classical form, known as "Middle Egyptian," served as the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period.

By the time of classical antiquity, the spoken language had evolved into Demotic, and by the Roman era, diversified into various Coptic dialects. These were eventually supplanted by Arabic after the Muslim conquest of Egypt, although Bohairic Coptic remains in use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.[7][note 2]

  1. ^ a b Erman & Grapow 1926–1961.
  2. ^ "Ancient Sudan~ Nubia: Writing: The Basic Languages of Christian Nubia: Greek, Coptic, Old Nubian, and Arabic". ancientsudan.org. Archived from the original on 5 January 2009. Retrieved 9 March 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  3. ^ a b Allen 2000, p. 2.
  4. ^ a b Loprieno 1995, p. 8.
  5. ^ Budge, E. A. Wallis (1920). Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (PDF). London: Harrison and sons. Archived (PDF) from the original on 12 December 2017.
  6. ^ Grossman, Eitan; Richter, Tonio Sebastian (2015). "The Egyptian-Coptic language: its setting in space, time and culture". Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics in Typological Perspective. De Gruyter Mouton. p. 70. doi:10.1515/9783110346510.69. ISBN 9783110346510. The Egyptian-Coptic language is attested in a vast corpus of written texts that almost uninterruptedly document its lifetime over more than 4,000 years, from the invention of the hieroglyphic writing system in the late 4th millennium BCE, up to the 14th century CE. Egyptian is thus likely to be the longest-attested human language known.
  7. ^ Layton, Benjamin (2007). Coptic in 20 Lessons: Introduction to Sahidic Coptic with Exercises & Vocabularies. Peeters Publishers. p. 1. ISBN 9789042918108. The liturgy of the present day Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt is written in a mixture of Arabic, Greek, and Bohairic Coptic, the ancient dialect of the Delta and the great monasteries of the Wadi Natrun. Coptic is no longer a living language.


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