page_title: Coptic language
section_title: Dialects
hierarchical_section_title: Coptic language / Dialects
context_page_description: Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the latest stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language that was developed during the Greco-Roman Egypt and was spoken until at least the 17th century. In the 2nd century BC, Egyptian began to be written in the Coptic alphabet, which is an adaptation of the Greek alphabet with the addition of six or seven signs from Demotic Egyptian to represent Afro-Asiatic sounds that the Greek language did not have.
  Several distinct Coptic dialects are identified, the most prominent of which are Sahidic, originating in parts of Upper Egypt and Bohairic, originally from the western Nile Delta in Lower Egypt.
  Coptic and Demotic are grammatically closely related to Late Egyptian, which was written with Egyptian hieroglyphs. Coptic flourished as a literary language from the 2nd to 13th centuries and its Bohairic dialect continues to be the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. It was supplanted by Egyptian Arabic as a spoken language toward the early modern period, but language revitalisation efforts have been underway since the 19th century.
context_section_description: 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 localised orthographic traditions with very little grammatical differences.
caption: Coptic and Arabic inscriptions in an Old Cairo church
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