page_title: Languages of the Roman Empire
section_title: Coptic
hierarchical_section_title: Languages of the Roman Empire / Regional languages / Coptic
caption_attribution_description: English: Page from Codex Tchacos.
context_page_description: Latin and Greek were the official languages of the Roman Empire, but other languages were important regionally. Latin was the original language of the Romans and remained the language of imperial administration, legislation, and the military throughout the classical period. In the West, it became the lingua franca and came to be used for even local administration of the cities including the law courts. After all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire were universally enfranchised in 212 AD, a great number of Roman citizens would have lacked Latin, though they were expected to acquire at least a token knowledge, and Latin remained a marker of "Romanness".
  Koine Greek had become a shared language around the eastern Mediterranean and diplomatic communications in the East, even beyond the borders of the Empire. The international use of Greek was one condition that enabled the spread of Christianity, as indicated for example by the choice of Greek as the language of the New Testament in the Bible and its use for the ecumenical councils of the Christian Roman Empire rather than Latin.
context_section_description: "Coptic" is the modern term for the form of ancient Egyptian that had developed in late antiquity. Written Coptic as a literary language seems to have resulted from a conscious effort among Egypt's educated class to revive their cultural heritage.
  In the 4th century, Coptic script—based on the Greek alphabet with additional characters from Egyptian demotic to reflect Egyptian phonology—is found in documents in several dialects, including Old Bohairic, Fayumic, Achmimic, and Sahidic. At this time Coptic emerged as a fully literary language, including major translations of Greek scriptures, liturgical texts, and patristic works. From the 4th to 7th centuries, original works—including homilies, saints' lives, monastic rules, letters, and exhortations—were composed in Coptic, primarily in the Sahidic dialect. As a writing system, Coptic was used for everyday purposes such as inventories and real estate transactions, as well as for poetry. By the 640s, when Egypt came under Arab rule, Coptic-speaking Christians constituted the majority of the population. At the end of the 7th century, legal texts might still be written in Coptic: in one example, a bilingual Greek-Arabic protocol with a reference to Mohammed precedes a document entirely in Coptic that invokes the Trinity.
caption: First page of the Gospel of Judas in the Coptic Codex Tchacos (3rd–4th century AD)
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