The pharaohs' language survives, spelled in Greek letters, in Coptic church services
Egyptian may have the longest recorded history of any language, stretching from just before 3200 BC into the Middle Ages. Its final stage, Coptic, dropped hieroglyphs for the Greek alphabet plus seven Demotic letters. No one speaks it natively now, but Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic priests still use it in daily worship.
Coptic is the last phase of Egyptian, an Afroasiatic language, and also the name of the script invented to write it. Greek influence ran deep after Alexander the Great took Egypt and the Ptolemies governed in Greek; bilingualism spread, especially in the Nile Delta, and Coptic absorbed Greek words for law, trade and technology. Even the name comes via Greek: Aigúptios, meaning Egyptian, passed into Arabic as qibṭ and then into European languages, giving English the word Copt. Speakers themselves simply called it the Egyptian language.
Writing Egyptian in Greek letters probably started in the 1st century BC; the earliest known text dates to the 1st century AD. Old Coptic texts are pagan magic and divination, with inconsistent spelling. Literary Coptic emerged in the 3rd century, almost entirely Christian or Gnostic; the Nag Hammadi library is mostly in the Sahidic dialect, which flourished across Egypt from about 325 to 800 AD. Why the script arose is debated: to translate Christian teaching, to assert a distinct Egyptian identity, or to break with the pagan associations of older scripts.
Arabic displaced it slowly. Around the start of the 8th century the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan made Arabic the sole language of administration, and within a few centuries a Coptic bishop, Severus ibn al-Muqaffa, was writing church history in Arabic. The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim is said to have banned Coptic outright in schools, streets and homes, backing the order with brutal punishment. Arabic probably became the main literary language by the 11th or 12th century, and the last known literary work in Coptic dates from the late 14th.
As a mother tongue it lingered much longer, surviving as a minority language to at least the 17th century and possibly in Upper Egypt into the 19th. In the 1930s, elderly passive speakers were still recorded in Zainiya, north of Luxor. Its biggest legacy is inside Egyptian Arabic, whose vocabulary, grammar and sounds carry a Coptic substratum. Bohairic, the Lower Egyptian dialect, is the one the church sings today.
Source: Coptic language
