THE HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF
THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN & COPTIC LANGUAGES
-The Decline of the Coptic Language-
The Decline :
The Coptic language is the last phase of the ancient Egyptian language
but is written in the Greek alphabet plus seven Demotic letters.57 The Copts
or the Christian Egyptians employed it as their spoken and written language
in their daily lives as well as in their churches for several centuries
before the Arab conquest. After the invasion of the Arabs in 642 A.D., Arabic
gradually began to replace the Coptic language, especially in 705/706 A.
D. when the “Umayyad Viceroy ‘Abd-Allah Ibn ‘Abd-al-Malik issued the hazardous
and untimely decree substituting Arabic for Coptic in all state Affairs.”58
Thus, the native scribe had to learn Arabic, which is attested by the number
of bilingual documents written in different centuries.
The decline in the use of Coptic was also linked to the widespread acceptance
of Islam, with many Christians adopting the new religion in order to work as
officials in the Islamic government. Evidence of the decline of Coptic can be
seen in a text from the tenth century urging the preservation of the Coptic language.
From this we can deduce that Arabic had begun to replace Coptic in most parts
of the Nile Valley in this century.
The grip of the Coptic language grew weaker even though it continued to be used
as a spoken and liturgical language until about the thirteenth century A.D. until
the thirteenth century, when Arabic became the written and spoken language and
Copts began to write their theological books in Arabic. However, in Upper Egypt,
Coptic was still in use until the seventeenth century. When the language began
to fade, Copts wrote it in Arabic letters, some manuscripts of which we have
indicating this usage.59
The Arab writer Al-Maqrisi, who lived in the fifteenth century, mentioned that
the monks in some monasteries were still using the Coptic language and most of
the wives and children of Christians living in Upper Egypt used Coptic in their
daily speech. In addition, Maspero stated that the inhabitants of Upper Egypt
were speaking and writing the Coptic language until the early years of the sixteenth
century A.D. By the eighteenth century, the Coptic language was considered dead
even though it is still employed in the many prayers and liturgies of the Coptic
Church to this day and some of its vocabulary has been mixed into the Arabic
in the modern, common spoken Arabic of Egypt.60